THE SPACE OF THE SOUTH AND SELFDEFINITION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN
RETURN MIGRATION NOVELS OF THE POSTCIVIL RIGHTS ERA
_______________________________________________________
A Dissertation
presented to
the Faculty of the Graduate School
at the University of Missouri-Columbia
_______________________________________________________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
_____________________________________________________
by
SHELLI ELIZABETH HOMER
Dr. Christopher N. Okonkwo, Dissertation Supervisor
MAY 2014
The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the graduate School, have examined the
dissertation entitled
THE SPACE OF THE SOUTH AND SELF-DEFINITION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN
RETURN MIGRATION NOVELS OF THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
presented by Shelli Elizabeth Homer,
a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance.
_____________________________________________________
Professor Christopher N. Okonkwo
_____________________________________________________
Professor Elaine Lawless
_____________________________________________________
Professor April C. E. Langley
_____________________________________________________
Professor Wilma King
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First, I would like to express my gratitude to my committee members, Elaine
Lawless, April C. E. Langley, and Wilma King for their time and valuable feedback
throughout my entire degree process. I would like to thank my adviser Christopher N.
Okonkwo for his endless encouragement and support through the long process of
developing, researching, and writing this dissertation. During the writing of this
dissertation, my beloved writing group kept me setting goals and moving forward, and
offered much needed moral support; so, thank you for your stability Brianne Jaquette and
Meagan Ciesla. There were also countless swimming pool, kickboard conversations with
poet Melissa Range that helped me work through my ideas about the South and southern
literature. I would also like to acknowledge Matthew D. Brown and Tracy Butts who set
me down the path of this dissertation many years ago by introducing me to many of the
writers in this study along with the traditions of southern American literature and African
American literature.
Finally, I want to thank my family for their constant support of my college
education over the past twelve years. Thank you to my mother, Renna Pehle, for always
being a phone call away and occasionally subsidizing my income. Thank you to my stepdad, Gary Pehle, for a five year subscription for monthly massages to keep my stress
levels down as I pursued this degree. Thank you to my brother, Sean Homer, for years of
unsolicited advice that have gotten me to this point. Thank you to my sister-in-law, Kathy
Keays-Homer, for attending ALL of my graduations; you are pretty special. And, my
ii
apologies to my dog, Lacey, for missing some walks when I was in the writing zone.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………...……………………………………………….…...ii
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………….……………………......v
CHAPTERS
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………..……...1
1. THE BLACK WOMAN’S BODY AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN
RAYMOND ANDREWS’S BABY SWEETS AND ALICE WALKER’S MERIDIAN..……….41
2. URBAN NORTHS AND RURAL SOUTHS IN PAULE MARSHALL’S PRAISESONG
FOR THE WIDOW AND TAYARI JONES’S LEAVING ATLANTA………..……................85
3. COMMUNITY-DEFINED IDENTITY AND THE SOUTH IN RANDALL KENAN’S A
VISITATION
OF SPIRITS AND TINA MCELROY ANSA’S UGLY WAYS……………………..........129
4. INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY FROM THE SOUTH IN GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY
AND TONI MORRISON’S HOME………………………………………………….176
CONCLUSION…………………….……………………………………………....218
BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………...……………………………….221
VITA……………………………………………………………………………………234
iv
ABSTRACT
My dissertation examines the representation of the return migration in African
American novels across the last five decades and argues that these return migration
novels are distinct from earlier migration narratives and, as such, do not fit within the
available critical frameworks developed from Great Migration literature. Historically, the
return migration occurred throughout the south-to-north Great Migration, but the
literature does not present the possibility of a successful return to the South until the mid1970s, which is where my project begins. My critical approach brings together W.E.B.
Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness and theories of place in order to understand the
importance of the region of the South in contemporary African American literature. I
argue that the significance of the South in African American return migration novels of
the post-Civil Rights era goes beyond its function as the site of the ancestor, as others
have posited. The South, in a state of redefinition following the Civil Rights Movement,
provides a fluid space where values of community and individualism relative to identity
can be reconciled through the return migrant’s connection to that space.
My project begins by considering the impact the Civil Rights Movement has on
the conceptualization of the return migration. I focus on Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976)
and Raymond Andrews’s Muskhogean County Trilogy, Baby Sweet’s (1983) in
particular, which revise the history of the Civil Rights Movement and black women’s
actions at the local level. My second chapter looks at the conflation of the urban with the
North and the rural with the South in the American imagination. I argue that Paule
v
Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta (2002)
challenge these dichotomies as their characters attempt to reconcile the two disparate
spaces in order to understand their place-based identities. The third chapter considers the
presence of community in the representation of the South and its impact on the
individual’s identity in Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways (1991) and Randall Kenan’s A
Visitation of Spirits (1989). The communities presented in these texts show the struggle
between internal desire and external expectations that, I argue, at times hinder characters’
abilities for self-definition. The final chapter and culmination of my project brings
together Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) to show
successful returns which center on the characters’ abilities to balance the communitydefined identity and the individual identity.
vi
INTRODUCTION
Robert Foster found financial success and walked taller in a land more
suited to him. But he turned his back on the South and the culture he
sprang from. He rarely went back. He plunged himself fully into an alien
world that only partly accepted him and went so far as to change his name
and assume a different persona to fit in. It left him a rootless soul, cut off
from the good things about the place he had left. He put distance between
himself and his own children, hiding his southern, perhaps truest self. […]
Ida Mae Gladney had the humblest trappings but was the richest of them
all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the
worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her. She
lived longer in the North than in the South but never forsook her origins,
never changed the person she was deep inside, never changed her accent
[…] She took the best of what she saw in the North and the South and
interwove them in the way she saw fit. […] She lived in the moment,
surrendered to whatever the day presented, and remained her true, original
self. Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve. And
because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest of them all.
- Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson closes The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) with her reflections on
the outcomes of those at the center of her study. In this final analysis, Wilkerson draws
attention to the different types of success and failure experienced by her Great Migration
subjects. She takes specific notice of the relationship between the spaces of the North and
the South and the migrants’ identities. Robert Foster’s success in the North comes at the
cost of “hiding his southern, perhaps truest self” by distancing himself from the South,
changing his name, and assuming a persona. Ida Mae Gladney, on the other hand,
“remained her true, original self” by maintaining her connections to the South and its
culture, and melding her experience of the North and the South to her benefit. Gladney’s
ability to reconfigure her knowledge of the North and the South and maintain a clear
sense of self is not the experience black writers of Great Migration novels generally focus
1
on. Instead, black writers during the Great Migration represent characters that move to
the North and attempt to distance themselves from their southern connections due to the
very immediate threat of Jim Crow laws and lynchings associated with the South at the
time of their writing.1 Foster’s experience, then, is much closer to those Lawrence
Rodgers identifies of Great Migration novels in Canaan Bound (1997). Rodgers, like
Wilkerson, sees the importance in the connection between place and identity “Because
who one is relies on possessing a sense of one’s place in the world […] the process of
migration is indelibly tied into the broader quest for identity. The Great Migration novel
plumbs the depths of this relationship between geography and identity” (4).The outcomes
of Great Migration novels, however, frequently depict the character’s displaced or
fractured identity as a result of being unable to find that place in the world.
My dissertation looks at African American return migration novels of the postCivil Rights era in which characters’ returns to the South in the literature parallel a
historical reverse migration of African Americans to the South, much like the characters
migrating to the North during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century mimic the
historical Great Migration to the North, Midwest, and West. Whether the returns are
failures or successes, return migration narratives all seek an understanding of the self and
a place in which to situate that understanding. In exploring the return migration novels
that followed the Great Migration narratives, my project commences where Rodgers’s
study of African American Great Migration novels concludes. I will be looking at the role
of the South in self-definition in selected post-Civil Rights era African American return
migration novels. The novels I examine in this dissertation span the five decades since
1
Bernard Bell identifies “obligatory Jim Crow episodes” (98) as a feature passed along between the literary
movements that occurred during the Jim Crow era, especially during the first half of the twentieth century
in his study The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987).
2
the Civil Rights Movement: Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), Raymond Andrews’s Baby
Sweet’s (1983), Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Gloria Naylor’s
Mama Day (1988), Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Tina McElroy Ansa’s
Ugly Ways (1993), Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta (2002), and Toni Morrison’s Home
(2012).2 The focal texts range from canonical Mama Day to the currently out of print and
thematically unsettling Baby Sweet’s, and include understudied texts by established
writers such as Ugly Ways and Home alongside Leaving Atlanta which represents the
concerns of a new generation of black writers. Additionally, to my knowledge, these texts
have not been discussed in relation to one another, nor with respect to the return
migration. I am classifying these illustrative texts as return migration novels of the postCivil Rights era. I define a return migration novel as a novel in which a journey occurs
from the North to the South—this is not simply a directional north-to-south movement,
but a transition between spaces that symbolize conceptions of the North and the South—
and the outcome of the southern return involves a grappling with place and one’s identity.
African American Migrations: A Historical Review
African American migrations have been a focus of much scholarly attention.
Scholars have labeled and documented these migrations in various ways.3 Some of the
broader versions of African American migration are those of Daniel M. Johnson and Rex
R. Campbell’s Black Migration in America: A Social demographic History (1981) and Ira
Berlin’s recent study The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations
2
Raymond Andrews is perhaps the least known of these authors. As Trudier Harris notes, “his imitation of
Hemingway [via his suicide in 1991] unfortunately has not earned him the same critical or objectionable
accolades” (South of Tradition 91).
3
In this brief review of African American migration studies, I have organized the works thematically rather
than chronologically to emphasize the different approaches scholars have taken when documenting the
migrations.
3
(2010). Berlin divides African American movement into 4 Great Migrations that reflect
spatial and temporal trends in history: 1) the transatlantic journey of the Middle Passage
from Africa to America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 2) the interior
passage of slaves from the Atlantic Seaborg to the southern interior during the first part
of the nineteenth century, 3) the northern migration of the twentieth century known as the
Great Migration, and 4) the global immigration of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
century of black populations from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe into
the United States. Berlin’s organization of African American migrations into four main
trends provides a more concise view of African American migration that accounts for
large historical movements of people. In their study, Johnson and Campbell take more
nuanced sociological approach that divides African American migration in the United
States into eleven movements. Like Berlin, their study accounts for the forced migration
to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the domestic slave trade that
moved African Americans through the South. It is at this point that their study begins
looking more closely at smaller trends in migration. They identify migration trends of the
Civil War and Reconstruction, and the turn-of-the-century migration that was occurring
prior to the Great Migration, most notably to Kansas. It is in their treatment of the Great
Migration, however, that their categorization of waves of migration differs from those of
other Great Migration scholars who break the Great Migration into two main waves: preWWII and post-WWII. Johnson and Campbell, instead, divide the Great Migration into
six different movements, noting distinctive trends among the decades: post-WWI, the
depression, WWII, post-WWII, the 1950s, and the 1960s. Since their study was thirty
years prior to Berlin’s, Johnson and Campbell end their account of African American
4
migration with speculation about the new trend of a reverse migration to the South, which
was emerging in the 1970s.
Other studies focus on specific migrations whether connected to specific time
periods or regions, and/or to internal and external migrations. Neither Berlin’s nor
Johnson and Campbell’s studies account for emigrations from the United States, such as
the three most significant back-to-Africa movements: the first occurring during slavery
throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the second following southern
Reconstruction at the turn of the century, and the third spearheaded post-WWI by Marcus
Garvey’s propaganda. Edwin S. Redkey’s Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-toAfrica Movements, 1890-1910 (1969), for instance, looks at the execution of the specific
back-to-Africa movement at the turn of the century that involved the movement of
African Americans to Liberia, which had been established in the first back-to-Africa
movement, while Colin Grant’s Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey
(2008) considers the post-WWI events that led participants in the Great Migration to
continue that movement from the North to Africa. Internal migration studies on the postbellum period, on the other hand, focus on specific internal migrations to the Midwest.
Nell Painter’s Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (1976) and
Leslie A Schwalm’s Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper
Midwest (2009) address African American migration from the South during the Civil War
and following Reconstruction. They characterize these earlier movements as less planned,
but as paving the way for future migrations, both small and large, by founding
communities to receive later migrants.
5
The Great Migration has and continues to be of great interest to scholars. There
have been numerous studies on the subject that approach it from both the perspective of a
larger movement and individual experiences. Neil Fligstein’s Going North: Migration of
Blacks and Whites from the South, 1900-1950 (1981) and Carole Marks’s Farwell—
We’re Gone and Gone: The Great Black Migration (1989) both take broader and more
popular approaches that view the Great Migration largely as a migration to the North.
The edited collection Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South
(1991) compiles essays that examine individual push-and-pull factors of the Great
Migration from labor and economics to violence and Jim Crow. Peter Gottlieb’s Making
Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-1930 (1987), James R.
Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989),
and Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo’s Abiding Courage: African American Women and the
East Bay Community (1996) all look to specific cities to which migrants relocated and the
effects they had on those cities. Timuel D. Black Jr.’s Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s
First Wave of Black Migration (2003) and Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s Second Wave
of Black Migration (2007), and Lisa Krissoff Boehm’s Making a Way out of No Way:
African American Women and the Second Great Migration (2009) are oral history
collections that depict individual experiences of migration. Black spotlights black
migrants to Chicago, while Boehm concentrates on black women migrants in several
locations, though mostly in Michigan. Finally, Nicholas Lehmann’s The Promised Land:
The Great Migration and How it Changed America (1991) and Wilkerson’s The Warmth
of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration combine features of a
comprehensive study of the Great Migration with individual personal narratives of those
6
who experienced it. Lehmann and Wilkerson both take into account the ending points of
their subjects. Lehmann takes the Great Migration full circle by ending with the same
Mississippi town he began his study with, not so much as a reflection on the return
migration, but to consider how southern towns had changed over the course of the Great
Migration. Wilkerson spent fifteen years conducting interviews aimed at uncovering why
the migrants decide to leave their homes, families, and communities in the South for a
new life in the North East, Midwest—mainly Chicago—or West. Although Wilkerson
attributes these planned migrations to violence in the region and to the desire for better
jobs, she identifies the desire for freedom as the most important reason.
In his attempt to push scholarship forward, Stewart Tolnay’s article “The African
American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond” (2003) gives a concise overview of the Great
Migration followed by recent migration trends in need of further study. He notes the
findings of previous scholarship, as well as the approaches future scholarship might take.
Tolnay asserts that the various migrations in the African American experience “are better
viewed as intrinsically linked, rather than entirely separate and unique” (228). In addition
to this overview, Tolnay touches on the research on the return migration, acknowledging,
significantly, a lack of scholarship on the topic and that the existing efforts contain
conflicting information. There is currently a large gap in the scholarship on African
American return migration to the South across the fields. He calls for more crossdisciplinary attention to the return migration, given its considerable though understudied
impacts and also its direct connection to the Great Migration, on which scholars have
focused the most.
7
In the early 1970s, newspapers began reporting on the return migration of African
Americans from the North to the South. They announced and encouraged these reverse
movements with headlines such as: “South Made Greatest Gains in Census” (1970),
“Black Migration to South is Urged: Alabamian Says Plan Would Widen Negro Political
Hold” (1971), “Blacks Return to South In a Reverse Migration” (1974), “Claim Blacks
Going Back ‘Home’” (1974) and “85% of Rise in Population Found in South and West”
(1975). The concept of a black return migration to the South4 was initially difficult for
scholars to reconcile. In an analysis of return migration data at the beginning5 of the
return migration, sociologists Larry Long and Kristen Hansen note a positive population
growth in the South for the first time in decades based on census data from 1960-1970.
Long and Hansen go on to conclude that there were larger numbers of white return
migrants than black return migrants and that “Newspaper accounts have probably
overplayed the role of return migration and underplayed the importance of decreased outmigration of Southern blacks” (612). The decrease in out-migration is an important factor
to return migration. It provides larger and more stable communities for migrants to return
and signals a decrease in the need to escape the South. The continuing increase in inmigration to the South during the decades following Long and Hansen’s study, however,
showed that newspapers were not overplaying the role of return migration to the South,
4
The United States’ Census Bureau defines the South as the 11 confederate states—Georgia, Florida, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas—
along with Washington DC, Oklahoma, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and West Virginia. This is the
definition of the geographical South I will be using in this project because the historical and sociological
studies I will be referencing gathered their quantitative migration data from the United States Census
Bureau. Various arrangements of these 16 states and the District of Columbia are used in studies of the
South, though most studies define the South in terms of 10-15 states.
5
It is also important to note that the return/reverse migration actually began with the Great Migration at the
turn of the 20th century with small numbers of black migrants consistently returning to the South across the
entire twentieth century, see Kevin McHugh’s “Black Migration Reversal in the United States” (1987). The
beginning referred to here is the significant shift in the population census that shows positive population
growth in the South for the first time since the start of the Great Migration out of the South.
8
but drawing attention to an important trend that represented a significant change in the
South. Long and Hansen also note that white return migrants were returning to the region
and heading to cities with employment, rather than returning to their states of birth; black
return migrants, however, were more likely to return to their states of birth and poor rural
communities. This migration to poor rural areas results in Long and Hansen claiming that
black return migration was not as well planed as white return migration, which showed
economic benefits.
Unlike the abovementioned views, anthropologist Carol Stack, the leading scholar
on the return migration to the South positions black return migration as even more
planned. She notes that black southerners had planned their returns before ever leaving
the South. Her qualitative study Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural
South (1996) is one of the more thorough undertakings on the return migration, with its
focus on the experiences of actual returnees to rural North and South Carolina counties.
She has a few earlier articles that also analyze the quantitative data of the return
migration better than other scholars because of her interest in qualitative research. Stack
does not simply use census numbers; she also interviews families and those returning to
the South, which actually alters the census information of other sociologists. She does so
by revising the definition of the term “return migrant.” In her article “Black Migration:
An Expected Return” (1987), she addresses the issue that statistical information only
inquires into the individual’s residency five years prior to each census, which limits the
understanding of larger migration trends. Additionally, the label of “return migrant” is
dependent on the individual’s birthplace being situated in the South, which Stack
acknowledges as unreflective of second generation migrants, who are born in the North
9
but spend much of their lives in the South with family who did not move to the North.
Stack’s more nuanced approach to definitions of return migrants results in a larger
number of reverse migrants being return migrants rather than new migrants.
In an interview with The Root after the release of her study on the Great
Migration, Wilkerson was asked about the current trend of black migrants moving from
the North to the South. She makes a distinction between the use of the terms “return
migration” and “reverse migration” explaining that she
prefer[s] the term ‘return migration’ as opposed to ‘reverse
migration.’ That's because ‘reverse migration’ makes it
seem the people had made a mistake and are going
backward. [She doesn't] believe any migration is ever a
mistake or going backward. It's a universal human story no
matter what our background. (qtd. in Dreyfuss)
The distinction between return migration and reverse migration is an important one;
however, it is more nuanced than Wilkerson contends. The term “return migration”
suggests the population migrating from the North, Midwest, and West to the South are
returning to a place they once lived or in which family ties remain. Based on southern inmigration statistics, return migration is generally only applied to 42 percent of migrants,
while the remaining 58 percent are categorized as non-return migrants. An expansion of
the definition of return migration to factor in an inter-generational model of family
migration—which accounts for familial connections across generations as the reason for
the return and specifically the movement of children; for instance, those born in the North
to migrants but raised in the South by those who stayed behind—changes the numbers to
69 percent of black migrants being return migrants and only 31 percent of black migrants
being non-return migrants (Cromartie and Stack 307-309; Stack, “Black Migration” 199200).
10
Like Wilkerson’s work on the Great Migration, Stack’s qualitative work on black
return migration has shed light on the complexities of, and the decisions to, return for
black migrants. Even with Stack’s expanded definition, the parameters of the term return
migration do not account for those who are non-return migrants. Thus, the term return
migration could be better situated as a subcategory of reverse migration. We must point
out that reverse migration does not necessarily mean a mistake or backwards movement
on the part of the migrants, as Wilkerson contends earlier, but rather an indication of the
reversal of the flow of migration ways used during the Great Migration.6 For non-return
migrants, generally, their reasons for migrating to the South are not really about someone
to whom, or someplace to which, to return. Some black non-return migrants move to the
space of the South with small groups of northern friends after retiring, to enjoy the
climate and lower cost of living, while other black non-return migrants in their 30s
relocate to southern metropolises for job opportunities.7 Thus, for the purposes of my
study, I prefer and will be using the phrase “return migration” because the texts I am
dealing with present migrants returning to a space and a place with which they have some
previous familial relationship or attachment, even if that connection is a generation or so
removed.
Long and Hansen point out in their study that more white southerners than black
southerners were involved in the return migration. The Great Migration saw the exodus
of both black and white southerners from the South with a larger number of white
southerners leaving than black southerners. A larger number of white return migrants,
however, does not make the return migration of black southerners less significant.
6
For salient flows of black migration ways during the Great Migration and their reversal in the 1970s see
Kevin McHugh’s “Black Migration reversal in the United States.”
7
See “Atlanta: New Mecca for Young Blacks” (1973).
11
Additionally, the violent and hostile history of the treatment of African Americans in the
South makes the return to that space much more significant than the return of white
southern migrants. Wilkerson offers population growth as a reason why the return
migration will not compare to the Great Migration:
When the Great Migration began, there were 10 million
African Americans in the U.S. You were looking at a
million leaving per decade. By the end of it, half [of blacks]
had been redistributed to the rest of the country. Currently
there are 35 million to 40 million African Americans. Even
the movement of a million people would not have the same
impact now that it would have then. (qtd. in Dreyfuss)
Nevertheless, the number of black return migrants to the South has been steadily
increasing over the past 40 years and has yet to slow. As a result, the full scale of the
possible impact return migration will have is yet to be seen, even as African American
writers, especially, continue to explore their personal and creative affinities to it.
Furthermore, African American affinities to the South, specifically following the
Civil Rights Movement, resulted in an expansion of the meaning of the term southerner.8
James C. Cobb’s Away Down South (2005) historicizes black and white southerners’
attitudes towards the South by their identification with the term southerner. Interpreting
survey data about feelings towards southerners between 1964 and 2001, Cobb concludes
that only 55 percent of southern black respondents considered themselves southern in
1964, while 90 percent of southern whites did; by 1976, that number rose to just below 80
percent and “by 2001 the percentage of blacks in the South who identified themselves as
southerners was actually higher than that for whites” (262-263). This resituating of a
regional identity where black southerners are classifying themselves as southern,
8
Thadious Davis notes in Southscapes that identification in the South after Jim Crow initially produced an
environment where “whites in the South became simply ‘southerners’ without racial designation, but blacks
in the South became simply ‘blacks’ without a regional designation” (29).
12
essentially claiming the South, speaks to the importance of the region of the South and
African American identity. Cobb develops this connection further by noting that “some
African Americans who lived outside the South were clearly drawing on their southern
roots [through southern drawls, dialects, dietary preferences, and the positive
reappropriation of the term ‘bama’] to help them define their blackness” (282).
Sherita L. Johnson expands on the connection between African Americans and the
South in her Black Women in New South Literature and Culture (2010). She argues that
the South and Southernness cannot be defined without considering the role of black
women in the region. Johnson uses fictional and historical figures from the postbellum
South at the turn of the twentieth century—including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,
Anna Julia Cooper, and female characters of Charles Chesnutt and George Washington
Cable—to show how black women were significant “agents of cultural change” in the
South despite being “often invisible in historical accounts of regional politics and culture,
especially as Southern black women” (emphasis original 2). Much like Danielle
McGuire’s recent study of the Civil Rights Movement At the Dark End of the Street:
Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from
Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (2010) which changes and illuminates the
historical record and of black women’s substantial contributions to and our
understandings of the Civil Rights Movement, Johnson’s study questions our
understanding of the South and how “the way we think about the South changes of we
recast black women, looking at the region as organized by and around black women”
(Johnson 2).
13
African American’s claiming their right to a southern regional identity motivated
Thadious M. Davis’s exploration of a more inclusive image of the Deep South appearing
in “traditional literature of the South” (19) in her study Southscapes: Geographies of
Race, Region, & Literature (2011). She takes an autobiographical approach to black
southern writing from Louisiana and Mississippi to interrogate attitudes about place and
southern identity from black writers such as Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, Alice
Walker, and Natasha Trethewey. She considers the return migration to the Deep South
through the movement of black writers between the South and other regions, and spatially
setting their literature in the Deep South despite residing elsewhere. She argues that the
return migration to the South, both culturally and regionally, “provides a major grounding
for identity particularly when in the absence of a distinct racial binary it has become
harder to formulate identity within the nexus of community” (35). The racial binary to
which Davis refers here reflects the segregated South where communities were defined,
in part, by geographical racial divisions.
Civil rights integration of the South changed the presence and idea of community
in the South, which, in turn, contributes to the complication of identity formation that is
connected to racial binaries. In other words, the instability of communities following the
Civil Rights Movement—and the subsequent devaluation of community apparent in the
consecutive arrival of Postmodernism9—forces a reconfiguration of identity in the
absence of a cohesive, strong, and stable community. While in general it may be harder to
9
Kalenda C. Eaton argues in her study Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black
Community, 1965-1980 (2008) that “One method of categorizing the confused state of the Black
Community connects its fractured organizational structure with the rise of a postmodern understanding of
social constructs and rejection of traditional unified goals” which followed the Civil Rights Movement (4).
Bernard Bell also notes that the sensibilities of postmodern writers “were shaped and misshaped by modern
jazz, rock music, drugs, ear in Vietnam, political assassinations, black power and women’s rights
movements, civil rights and antiwar demonstrations, [and] campus sit-ins and building take-overs” (283).
14
formulate an individualist identity within community, black writers of the post-Civil
Rights era continue to explore the function of communities in individuals’ self-definition.
In addition to the search for a place to formulate identity, Davis notes the importance of a
southern return like Gaines’, which involved him building a home on the plantation
where he was born and generations of his family resided before him. The fictionalization
of return migrations in African American post-Civil Rights era novels brings together the
connections between the space of the South, various configurations of community—
including unknown, family, and home communities—and the formation of a whole self.
The South of Return Migration Narratives
Stack’s analysis of the role of familial generations involved in experiences of the
South, as mentioned earlier, can also be seen in some northern black writers’
relationships to the South. In a 1998 interview, “Blacks, Modernism, and the American
South: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Carolyn Denard notes that Morrison is not a
southerner herself and as such her “sense of the South” and of African Americans’
relationships with the South is largely influenced by her “parents’ memories of the
South” (1). Denard then asks Morrison, “What was your perception, the sense of the
South that you gained from your parents?” Morrison cites her parents’ relationships to the
South as inspiration for her own characters’ experiences with migration and the South.
She explains that her parents
had diametrically opposed positions. My father was born in
Georgia. My mother was born in Alabama. Both were from
very small towns in those states. My father thought that the
most racist state in the Union was Georgia and that it would
never change. My mother had much fonder memories. She
was very nostalgic about the South. But she never visited
it—ever. While my father went back every year. Quarreling
and fussing all the way, he went back to see his family—
15
aunts, uncles—there. So I grew up with a complicated
notion of the South, neither sentimental nor wholly
frightening. On the one hand, with no encouragement, my
mother was nostalgic about the Alabama farm, yet she
would talk in a language of fear about her family’s escape
from the South. On the other hand, my father recounted
vividly the violence that he had seen first-hand from White
southerners, but he regularly returned. (qtd. in Denard 1)
This complicated notion of and personal relationships to the South that Morrison
discusses here are actually common in African American literature, especially that of the
post-Civil Rights era which attempts to reconcile the space of the South. Some characters
are inexplicably drawn to the South through an ambiguous nostalgia for it, while others
return very purposefully to take action. No matter their attraction or intent, however, all
of them must address their relationship with the space in order to reconcile their
identities. Although Morrison’s father verbally disavows the South and yet feels
familially tied to it and her mother verbally holds onto it but physically rejects it, neither
could move on without it.
While how to define a geographical South is important when using the term “the
South,” the definition of the other South of the literary imagination is of equal
importance. This imagined space is the most difficult to define. The South of the African
American literary imagination is a fluid space that exists beyond a geographical
understanding of the South and within the creative space of the individual writer. For
example, Morrison’s Sula (1973) fits within the Southern Gothic tradition, despite its
geographical setting of Ohio. Morrison evokes the imagined, fluid South in her depiction
of the Bottom and its community. The imagined South can exist outside of the boundaries
16
of Jim Crow laws, which becomes much more prevalent in post-Civil Rights era.10 The
imagined South also has a much larger presence in literary works; at times, it is
embodied, personified as another character, ubiquitous.
Black writers’ preoccupation with the imagined South reflects their interest in
challenging the history and culture that reside there. Trudier Harris acknowledges the
way in which the South has been portrayed as a healing space for black women, not black
men. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line (2009) Harris asserts that becoming a true African
American writer “come[s] only after a confrontation with black history and American
history as represented by and in the South. That history of repression, violence, and lack
calls out to each generation of African American writers, and each generation responds in
its own way” (16). Harris’s study centers on the way the African American writer has
been influenced by a fear of the South as a region. I agree with Harris’s assertion that the
fear of the South shaped African American literature of the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century. With the end of Jim Crow laws in the mid-1960s, however, African
American writers of the mid-1970s through the twenty-first century address that
trepidation and push beyond it in order to reclaim the South as a region.
In the African American literary imagination, the fear of the South has largely
been replaced with an enduring desire to reclaim it by acknowledging and transcending
its violent history. To Morrison, the impetus for this reclamation has to do with the
10
Brian Norman notes in Neo-Segregation Narratives (2010) that segregation narratives that were written
during the period of Jim Crow were preoccupied with the very real and immediate need to remove Jim
Crow laws, while those narratives written during the post-Civil Rights era that temporally revisit the Jim
Crow era do so to revise the historical account surrounding that earlier time period. As Farrah Jasmine
Griffin notes of Song of Solomon (1977) that “The South to which [Milkman] goes is not a place of racial
horror and shame, it is a site of history and redemption for him—a place where he can begin to piece
together the fragments an where he can grasp and sing that which Kabnis sought, the Song of the Son”
(177). The threats of the Jim Crow South prevent Jean Toomer’s Kabnis from successfully reinhabiting the
South and reconnecting to his southern culture, while Morrison’s Milkman is able to avoid those threats
because his Jim Crow South is written after its end.
17
South’s dual position and positioning as both “home” (viewing it as the “first stop” for
African Americans in the United States), and its connection to the modern, a place where
black culture for the most part refused assimilation and continued to innovate and create
(qtd. in Denard 14). Morrison states,
But this is a whole new experience—and it is a modern
experience. So that there is some modernity and some grasp
on the future that the South holds more than any other
place. Although I understand nostalgia about it being
everybody’s past, and the good old days, and ma and pa
and grandpa and so on. But for me the actual thing that was
going on was this wholly modern thing. (qtd. in Denard 15)
Morrison further explains,
I think the South is now, finally, getting close to the edge of
the modern world because Black people are there. Once
White people gave up the legal claim to the things they
were doing—killing blacks, bullyinging them, and pushing
White supremacy, ideologically and personally—they
stopped to see what was in their best interest. Then and
only then, did it become a modern part of the world. (qtd.
in Denard 16)
Morrison offers an assessment of two sides of the South in its connection to the
modern. First, she emphasizes the role of the South in African American culture as
always holding modernity, identifying it as “the earliest 19-th century modernist
existence” (qtd. in Denard 14). As such, she asserts that the South still holds an
opportunity for an innovative and creative black culture. Second, Morrison distinguishes
the end to Jim Crow laws as allowing the South to move into the modern world. The
South’s becoming a part of the modern world has also meant a rejection of its position as
a static space. Likewise, Jeffery J. Folks and James A. Perkins assert in Southern Writers
at Century’s End (1997) that “The rapid Southern transformation to modernity has
produced a greater sense of disorder and conflict than elsewhere. Southern culture, quite
18
simply, has moved further in a shorter period of time than have other regional cultures in
America” (4). This is particularly important to the South of the African American literary
imagination. Black writers have turned their attention to the South in its state of change to
re-imagine and reinvent that space for African Americans. The literature largely reimagines the possibilities for a successful relationship with the southern space, where
previously the South had been represented as failing to support black characters.
African American migration narratives accompanying the historical Great
Migration depict characters’ attempts at returning to the South after living in the North
and/or abroad, but those efforts do not bring the desired outcomes of self-fulfillment and
a sense of place and belonging. African American novels written prior to and during the
early stages of the Great Migration took up the idea of the difficulties of African
American return migration in works such as Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
(1901), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jean
Toomer’s Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), most notably through the
characters of Chesnutt’s Dr. Miller, Johnson’s Ex-Colored Man, Toomer’s Kabins and
Larsen’s Helga Crane. Farrah Jasmine Griffin assesses the treatment of the South in
Johnson, Toomer, and Larsen’s early return migration novels in Who Set You Flowin’?
(1995). She argues that for Johnson, Toomer and Larsen, a return to the South is not yet
viable, nor necessarily desirable (146). Griffin even goes as far as to call Larsen’s South
“a provincial, black living hell” (159). The ambiguous endings to Chesnutt, Toomer, and
Larsen’s novels,11 however, suggest that they have not given up on the South despite the
11
The Marrow of Tradition ends with Dr. Miller being granted admission into Major Cateret’s home, to
which he had previously been rejected because of his race, to save the white, young, dying Dodie. This
raises the question of whether or not this will be a onetime event or if Dr. Miller’s status has actually
changed in the eyes of white supremacist Major Cateret. Likewise, the ending of Larsen’s Quicksand holds
19
inability to get what they need from it, or that they wanted to embrace the south but just
could not do so under the circumstances. This ambiguity with the South is similar to that
which Morrison discusses in relation to her parents’ conflicted relationships with the
region.
Mid-century, rather than contemplating the possibilities of a return to the South,
Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Native Son (1940), James Baldwin’s
Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) represented
the need for many of their main characters, both male and female, to leave the South and
not return. While there is a clear distancing from the physical South in these novels, the
ambiguity that exists is regarding the North. Finally, written towards the end of the Civil
Rights movement, Ernest Gaines’s Of Love and Dust (1967) and the Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman (1970) portray black characters taking physical stands in the South,
but their outcomes—mainly death at the hands of white southerners, though occasionally
flight, as is the case for Of Love and Dust’s Pauline—raise the question of what is to be
gained by fighting for the southern space.
It is important to point out that although African American literature of the Great
Migration tends to represent the migration to the North as a dilemma if not a failure, that
failure is really of the North not fully living up to the historical idealization of it as racial
shelter in the African American consciousness. In the literature, migrants must deal with
northern hostilities in addition to their difficulties as migrants in a new space. Such
experiences challenge the idea of the North as the Promised Land for African Americans.
Griffin’s Who Set You Flowin’ ?: The African-American Migration Narrative and
the ambiguity of how she feels about the position she finds herself in, poor and continuously birthing
children, once returning to the South.
20
Rodgers’s Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel explore the
complex experiences depicted in African American migration narratives of the Great
Migration.
Griffin utilizes the term narrative to extend her analysis of literature to include
visual art, films, and song lyrics. Griffin identifies a framework in African American
migration narratives made up of four pivotal moments: an event that moves the action
north, a detailed encounter with the urban space, the migrant’s attempt to negotiate that
space and/or its effects, and the possibilities and limits of a specific region. Griffin rejects
the idea of a static migration narrative and notes that migration “narratives are as diverse
as the people and the times that create them” (4). Her chapter addressing the possibilities
and limitations of a specific region focuses on the representations of southbound return
migrations in African American literature. After spending the bulk of her study treating
African American migration narratives written during the Great Migration to the North,
Griffin chooses Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as the exemplar text for postCivil Rights era narratives of return migration to the South.
Morrison’s novel differs from the earlier texts treated by Griffin because
Morrison’s main character, Milkman, achieves success: he is guided to the South by his
ancestor, he gains an understanding of his family’s roots, and he returns to the North a
whole person with a new sense of self and understanding of his people. Characters
attempting to return to the South in African American literature prior to the Civil Rights
Movement are unable to realize such success, as shown in the cases of Jean Toomer’s
21
Kabnis and Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane12. I argue that the ability of characters in African
American literature of the post-Civil Rights era to go to the South and successfully find
in it needed cultural nourishment and belonging represents a distinctive shift in the
treatment of the South in migration narratives. While, for instance, Morrison’s Milkman
returns to the South for a short trip before returning to his northern life, other writers’
characters make the decision to leave the North indefinitely and take a much larger stake
in the return to the South because it is not a just a space to find the ancestor and roots, but
a place to seek out and establish their selves.13
In the epilogue to his study Canaan Bound, Rodgers notes that the 1970s showed
a reversal in African American movement, which signaled the end of the Great
Migration. He briefly assesses post-Ellison Great Migration novels, which he classifies as
those written after the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1952. He asserts
that following the end of the Great Migration, novels connected to migrant culture fall
into three categories: one, urban narratives made possible by the movement of the Great
Migration but not involving migration; two, the “narratives of southern reconstruction,”
which optimistically dismantle the myth of the North as the promised land; and three,
novels that revive the south-to-north migration while “positioning the South as AfricanAmerican culture’s locus of identity” (181-183). Rodgers argues that of these three
categories, only the third falls into the migration novel form; however, Rodgers only
12
Toomer’s Kabnis in Cane (1923) is unable to reintegrate himself in his family’s southern hometown
despite having access to the necessary ancestor, and Larsen’s Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928) is disgusted
with the poverty in the rural South, childbearing, and religion, as she lies awaiting death.
13
Griffin cites Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as her example of a successful return migration to the
South partially due to Morrison’s status as the leading contemporary black writer. Song of Solomon, while
an appropriate example for Griffin’s project, is a less typical representation of the return migration novel
because it features a male protagonist who spends the majority of the narrative in the North and does not
make a permanent return to the South. However, if the focus of analysis shifted from Milkman’s return to
Pilate’s return, there could be a discussion that places the text more in line with other return migration
novels.
22
recognizes the migration novel form as one that involves a south-to-north migration. The
second category Rodgers identifies includes numerous novels depicting a return
migration from the North to the South, which is significant to the plot and the characters’
experiences. It is these novels that need to be recognized as migration narratives and
treated with attention to the distinct differences between the concerns of earlier Great
Migration novels and the concerns of the return migration to the South.
Griffin and Rodgers both totalize their treatment of African American Great
Migration narratives by broadly classifying them as migration narratives. Rodgers
qualifies migration novels as necessarily moving from south-to-north, which eliminates
those with north-to-south migrations from his tradition of African American migration
novels. Griffin, on the other hand, acknowledges movement in either direction, but her
framework focuses on a northbound experience that leaves the majority of return
migration narratives of the post-Civil Rights era outside of her parameters. These
limitations do not undercut the significance and contributions of their studies; instead,
they reflect the above mentioned importance of the Great Migration and show the need
for multilayered scholarship on African American literary representations of black
movement in the United States after the Great Migration. My project builds upon Griffin
and Rodgers’s studies by picking up where their efforts conclude in order for me to
consider the significance of the return migration to the South in contemporary African
American novels.
It is important to distinguish the return migration narratives of the post-Civil
Rights era from the northbound migration narratives of the Great Migration, which is the
purpose of this study. The post-Civil Rights era return migration novels do not fit into the
23
same template as the northbound or return migration narratives of the previous era, nor
are they generated from the same socio-political climate—that of the Jim Crow era.
Griffin’s established scaffold appropriately reflects the northbound migration narratives
of the Great Migration, but it begins to break down with the previously mentioned subset
of post-Civil Rights era return migration narratives. The first three of Griffin’s pivotal
moments are specific to a north-to-south migration where the migrant spends the majority
of his/her time in the North. Since that is not the case for characters in return migration
novels, it is only Griffin’s forth pivotal moment—in which characters contemplate the
possibilities and limits of a specific region—that holds as return migrants position their
identities relative to their new understanding of the South.
Griffin recognizes the importance of the shift in the treatment of the South of the
post-Civil Rights era. She notes that “The view of the South as a place of possibility […]
is indicative not only of a tendency to romanticize the South, but also of an attempt to
reconsider its significance to black people, an attempt that in many ways would have
proven futile prior to the Civil Rights Movement” (146). This thematic shift in African
American literature runs concurrently with the literal, reverse migration trend of African
Americans moving from the North to the South. In much the same way that the Great
Migration occasioned northbound migration narratives, this reverse migration also
inspired southbound migration narratives that draw attention to men and women’s
migration destinations. These novels address the questions: Why return to the South and
what does the South have to offer African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era?
Griffin’s answer to these questions is the presence of the ancestor. While the ancestor is a
critical figure in many migration narratives, it is not the only reason to return to the South
24
nor does it appear in all return migration novels. Although cultural heritage is an
important aspect of the South in return migration novels, the narratives also pay specific
attention to the individualized experience.
Rodgers claims that a key feature of the novels he classifies as narratives of
southern recolonization is that they “recuperate a sweep of southern geographies where
loyalty to the ideal of community is the critical underpinning of black life” in order to
“challenge the conception that black and northern culture are becoming ever more
synonymous” (182). Although African American literature about the South has been
heavily criticized14 for romanticizing black folk culture, it has remained connected to the
idea of community. Likewise, the North has been largely associated with individuality, as
exemplified in Great Migration novels such as Ellison’s Invisible Man. It should be
clarified, however, that African American return migration novels do not blindly
celebrate the South nor do they necessarily condemn the North; instead, the return to the
South engages with the possibilities of the New post-Civil Rights South when, as
Rodgers argues throughout his study, finding a place in the North has proven “to be an
elusive and at times impossible goal” (38). I argue that the South of the post-Civil Rights
era has become a space where the individual can, at least, unite with the community,
while maintaining the important aspects of the self realized in the North.
There has been the sense, following the Civil Rights Movement, however, that
African American women writers such as Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and
Gayl Jones have generally romanticized the possibility of the South in the African
American literary imagination. This glamorization has been done largely through the
14
For example, see Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood (1987) and Madhu Dubey’s Signs and
Cities (2003).
25
simplicity of the rural and the necessity of roots represented by the ancestor in order to
“defragment the self” (Griffin 146). In order to understand the ways in which the South is
being reclaimed by black writers, it is important to consider the role of displaced histories
an impetus for identifying the change that takes place in the South. The fragmentation of
the black psyche is sometimes portrayed as the result of failed attempts to balance the
North and the South, among other things. This is why it is important to approach the
representations of the South through return migration novels where the characters,
although living outside the space of the South, still choose to return to it. The choice to
return to a space that has historically been experienced as volatile and dangerous for
African Americans is significant in relation to the migration to the North where black
migrants’ knowledge of their destination is largely idealized. That characters, after
experiencing both the North and the South, desire or decide to return to the South would
suggest that, despite its violent legacy, the South has something constructive, something
positive, to offer African Americans.
My project looks at how black writers are writing about the South and to what
ends. More specifically, I am interested in the impact the South has on African American
writers’ literary imaginations from the perspective of identity and place. I grapple with
the question: Why is a return to the South—a fluid and ambiguous space both
geographically and metaphorically—necessary for the fullness of African American
identity? This dissertation argues that the project of defining stable, whole black selves is
one of the preoccupations of the focal African American return migration novels of the
post-Civil Rights era and, significantly, that the narratives situate that process towards
self-definition within the South because the place-based identity that emerges as a part of
26
the return migration enables the attainment of a more whole self. I attempt to balance the
significance of place in the novels with the relationships between the community and the
individual. Although literary scholars have noted a shift in the treatment of the South in
African American literature beginning in the mid-1970s, they have not thoroughly
accounted for that shift beyond their general interest in the representation of the South as
a space of healing enabled by the presence of the ancestor. There are various reimaginings of the South in African American literature by both black men and women
novelists, and these writers, particularly those discussed in this study, have largely,
though not exclusively, focused on repositioning black female characters within the postCivil Rights South.
Methodology
My theoretical and analytical framework is grounded in space and place theory, in
approaches to the self, and in what literary historian Bernard Bell has developed through
the sociological idea of “socialized ambivalence.” I draw especially upon Doreen
Massey’s discussion of space and place and Hortense Spillers’s psychoanalytical
discussion of the self, which, like Bell’s construct, is developed from the sociological
concept of “double-consciousness.” Both scholars offer important and germane insight on
the difference between the community and the individual relative to identity construction
and the theory of home.
Bernard Bell charts the development of the African American novel in The AfroAmerican Novel and Its Tradition (1987). He situates the overarching concerns in the
African American novel around the concepts of W.E.B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness,
Melville J. Herskovits’s socialized ambivalence, and Ralph Ellison’s double vision, all
27
suggesting a duality of identity. Bell maps the development of the African American
novel with romances and realism in the early decades developing into social
consciousness engaging race, class, and gender conflicts surrounding the turn of the
twentieth century. During the Harlem Renaissance, he notes the expansion of the
exploration of double-consciousness from the bourgeoisies to the lower classes. He
suggests a temporary rejection of the concept of double-consciousness in the 1940s
naturalism of Richard Wright, although Wright’s contemporaries persisted in its
exploration. As the novel continued to develop through the 1950s, Bell distinguishes “a
movement away from naturalism and nonracial themes, and a movement toward the
rediscovery and revitalization of myth, legend, and ritual as appropriate sign systems for
expressing the double-consciousness, socialized ambivalence, and double vision of the
modern black experience” (189), which continues into the 1980s. He concludes with a
summation of his study, suggesting that “if there is an Afro-American canonical story, it
is the quest, frequently with apocalyptic undertones, for freedom, literacy, and
wholeness—personal and communal—grounded in social reality and ritualized in
symbolic acts of Afro-American speech, music, and religion” (341-342). This exploration
of personal and communal wholeness has continued in the return migration novels of the
post-Civil Rights era, which specifically recognize the role of place in the quest for
wholeness.
Du Bois defines double-consciousness in The Souls of Black Folks (1903) as
a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense
of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on
in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
28
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder. (12)
Bell pinpoints the importance of double-consciousness as “The historical quest of black
Americans, their principal canonical story, in short, is for life, liberty, and wholeness—
the full development and unity of self and the black community—as a biracial, bicultural
people, as Americans of African descent” (12). Spillers also builds upon the relationship
between the self and the black community in W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of African
American double-consciousness. She addresses the external aspect of the psychological
twoness in which the individual, as the representative of the race, sees one’s self through
the eyes of white dominant culture, and the internal aspect of the self which develops
internally in relation to black culture.
Spillers draws attention to the internal self, suggesting that it has been underacknowledged in the minimal theorizing on race and psychoanalysis. Spillers notes that
one of the negative aspects of the success of the Civil Rights Movement is the destruction
of black communities. She sees this as one of the reasons it has become so important to
address the internal side of the Du Boisian double. She refers to the internal piece of the
fragmented black self in terms of the “one” who must engage in “interior
intersubjectivity,” in self-reflection, with the goal of self-defining through speaking (395401). Dickson Bruce explains the internal side of Du Bois’s double-consciousness as the
pull of “a distinctive African consciousness” in an effort “to privilege the spiritual in
relation to the materialistic, commercial world of white America” (301). Bruce’s
description of the internal side of double-consciousness aligns with Bell’s use of
socialized ambivalence which he defines as “the dancing attitudes of Americans of
African ancestry between integration and separation, a shifting identification between the
29
values of the dominant white and subordinate black cultural systems as a result of
institutionalized racism” (xvi). The pull of “a distinctive African consciousness” that
Bruce identifies can be understood as an existential response to the socialized
ambivalence experienced through the dominant American culture of materialism being
externally imposed on individuals’ identities, amongst other expectations.
As noted earlier, the South, as the “first stop” (Morrison qtd. in Denard 14) in the
United States, functions as the homeland for African Americans and as a key site for
black culture which positions this internal, African consciousness within the space of the
South. Bell asserts that
Afro-American culture, which has its historical roots in the
deep South and the dynamics of sex, ethnicity, and class,
means in this context the symbolic and material expression
by black Americans of their relationship to nature, the
black community, and the white community as they seek to
adapt to the environment in order to first survive and then
to thrive, both individually and collectively. (339-340)
The strained relationships between the black community and the individual15, much more
apparent in post-Civil Rights era African American literature, work to further complicate
the internal side of Du Bois’s double-consciousness. Additionally, the success of
integration during the Civil Rights Movement, along with the institutionalized racism that
remained, has increased tensions between the individual and the black community.
Du Bois notes a fragmentation between the black self imagined by the white
dominant culture and the self within the black culture. I suggest, however, that the
internal self, positioned within the black culture, is also determined and sometimes over
determined externally by the expectations of the black community in which the individual
15
It has become a much more recurrent focus in the past forty years, but can also be seen in earlier texts
such as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1941) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).
30
lives, thus creating another point of split between the self constructed by the community
and the self within the individual. The acknowledgement of each individual’s multiple
subjectivities16 that has developed alongside postmodernism makes this self-reflection
even more necessary, but not in Du Bois’s sense of a “self-conscious manhood [as]
merg[ing] his double self into a better and truer self” (13). Instead of attempting to merge
the double self, reflection is necessary to construct whole and stable selves from which
African Americans can perform their various subjectivities and also negotiate those
subjectivities shaped by both the black community and the dominant white culture. That
is to say, I am not suggesting that there is a single identity to be had, but that there is the
desire for a stable foundation of the self from which an individual’s various
identities/multiple subjectivities can develop.
In Space, Place, and Gender (1994), Massey critiques the trend of space and
place theory that positions time as fluid and space and place as static.17 The
romanticization of places—in the case of this study, the South of the American
imaginary—contributes to the image of space and place as static, as trapped in time. She
claims that understandings of identity are the reason space and place are conceptualized
as such because “A ‘sense of place’, of rootedness, can provide – in this form and on this
interpretation – stability and a source of unproblematical identity” (151). In other words,
since human beings give meaning to spaces, the desire for a stable identity and the idea
that a stable identity does not change results in a static view of place, to which identity is
16
Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is commonly cited for her
discussion of multiple subjectivities. Also, see Norma Alarcon’s development of the concept within
Chicana feminism.
17
For instance, Yi-Fu Tuan’s foundational study Space and Place (1977) differentiates between space and
place by identifying space as a movement and place as a pause. However, when he goes on to discuss the
relationship between space and time, he defines space as historical and suggests that “When we look
outward we look at the present or future; when we look inward (that is, introspect) we are likely to
reminisce about the past” (126). In both cases, space is situated in a specific time.
31
connected. However, in much the same way that a singular static identity has been
questioned with the idea of multiple subjectivities, Massey questions the treatment of
space and place as static. When spaces are in flux, as the South is following the Civil
Rights Movement, or when spaces are treated as fluid, identities associated with such
spaces and places should be or are inevitably redefined. Allowing for the fluidity of space
and place is what occurs, especially in the focal African American return migration
novels of the post-Civil Rights era, as writers seize the opportunity to remake both the
space of the South—which results in new understandings of specific places—and the
individuals who occupy it.
A fluid sense of space and place—which Massey terms a progressive sense of
place—accounts for the dependent relationships between time and space and between
time and place where understandings of space and place are constantly shifting for the
individual and the community, in conscious and unconscious ways. E Relph makes a
clear distinction between what he identifies as unselfconscious sense of place and
selfconscious sense of place in his seminal work on place theory, Place and
Placelessness (1976). He views the unselfconscious sense of place as the authentic sense
of place which “is above all that of being inside and belonging to your place both as an
individual and as a member of a community, and to know this without reflecting upon it”
(emphasis original 65). Implied in Relph’s statement is the existence of an innate sense of
belonging and sense of place that is accepted without question or knowledge. He claims
that an authentic and unselfconscious sense of place “provides an importance source of
identity for individuals, and through them for communities” (65-66). This valuing of
authentic, unselfconscious sense of place, however, becomes complicated when
32
considering the historical migration of African Americans, beginning with the forced
movement from Africa to America during slavery. Across African American literature,
from Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison, the importance of a conscious sense of place has
been a recurrent theme due to sociohistorical structures and strictures—first slavery, then
Jim Crow segregation laws—that sought to dictate African Americans’ interactions with
and access to certain places. Accordingly, African American migration novels of the
post-Civil Rights era explicitly contemplate the spaces and places occupied by the
characters, which Relph would identify as the less authentic selfconscious sense of place
where “they [the places] become objects of understanding and reflection” (66). In African
American migration novels, generally, but more specifically those engaging with the
South, characters who have an unselfconscious sense of place or those that refuse to
reflect upon place suffer in various ways because of it.
Although it is the individual that faces the formation or the reconciliation of
his/her identity, this work does not occur alone, or, at the very least, not in isolation.
African American return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era show the complex
part the community plays in the process. Massey also engages with the role of
community in her analysis of space and place. She acknowledges that the existence of a
community can offer one unified definition of a place, but, as the works understudy will
demonstrate, place is experienced differently by every individual. Thus every place has
both a community-defined identity and an individual self-determined identity. People,
certainly, are not places, but a similar experience of identity can be seen in relation to
focal characters’ identities. There are the community-defined identities ascribed onto
them by their communities and the individual identities they work to define themselves.
33
The characters are part of various communities with different formations, but one
community, typically the home community, holds more power over their identities than
do the others. This community-defined identity can also disrupt or displace the individual
identity, as the return migrants experience most vividly when they are outside of the
South. The community-defined identity tends to be associated with the South and the
individual identity with the North. The return to the South—to home, as it were—allows
for these stressed aspects of one’s identities to be more wholly unified.
Relph and Massey both stress the importance of home in relation to an
individual’s sense of place and self. Relph claims that “In authentic experience ‘home’,
whether a house, a village, a region, or a nation, is a central point of existence and
individual identity from which you look out on the rest of the world” (83). Despite its
importance, Relph states, “The meaning of ‘home’ has been weakened not only through
increased mobility and a splitting of the functions associated with it, but also by
sentimentalism and commercialism” (83). In contemporary society, home has become
associated with a house, but the various aspects of one’s life that would include home are
kept separate from one another. This separation between home life, work life, and social
life, for instance, no longer makes home the central point of existence. As such, Relph
asserts that the frequent “interchangeability of ‘homes’—it has been estimated that in
North America the rate of mobility is equivalent to each household moving once every
three years—is both made possible by and reinforces the reduction in the significance of
‘home’” (83). In this conceptualization, home does not hold historical significance nor
does it seem to matter where it is geographically located. The decision, however, for
34
return migrants to go back to the South, to home, suggests that the idea of home is still
significant and something quite different from the physical structure of a house.
An issue Massey raises relative to a return home, in For Space (2005), is that
“Migrants imagine ‘home’, the place they used to be, as it used to be” (123). In most
cases, this “used to be” translates to nostalgia surrounding the idea of home, which she
views as detrimental. As Massey writes, “nostalgia constitutively plays with notions of
space and time” so “that the imagination of going home […] so frequently means going
‘back’ in both space and time. Back to the old familiar things, to the way things used to
be” (124). Massey adds “that when nostalgia articulates space and time in such a way that
it robs others of their histories (their stories), then indeed we need to rework nostalgia”
(124). While Morrison, referenced above, distinguishes between nostalgia for the South
and the modern South holding opportunities for the future, Massey recognizes nostalgia
as robbing others of their stories, and that view is entirely appropriate when considering
the type of nostalgia still existing for the South in American popular culture.18
In African American literature there is, however, a different type of nostalgia
present in relation to the concept of region and home. Acknowledging place as fluid,
rather than static, rejects the practice of nostalgia because “the truth is that you can never
simply ‘go back’, to home or to anywhere else. When you get ‘there’ the place will have
moved on just as you yourself will have changed” (Massey 125). It can be said, therefore,
that in many ways the Civil Rights Movement was fighting against nostalgia for the
South that sought to keep certain antebellum formal structures within the South. In
18
See the essay collection Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (2000)
for a historical development of southern nostalgia, and Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie: Race,
Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003) for an analysis of southern nostalgia in American
popular culture.
35
African American return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era, there are moments
of character nostalgia for the rural, black folk South; however, and more important, there
are also significant periods in the novels when significant change is clearly recognized
and viewed positively for both the individual and the community.
The concept of home is less geographically placed in African American literature
and the quest for home is directly connected to the exploration of identity in relation to
place. In Burning Down the House: Home in African American Literature (2005), Valerie
Sweeny Prince claims that the failure of the North to deliver its promises during the Great
Migration left the “Passion for home [running] like lifeblood through the African
American psyche” (2). As Rogers suggests, “The basic drive of migration is the search
for a livable home” (4). While Rogers’s idea of home was a literal place, much like Relph
and Massey’s descriptions, Prince discusses home as intangible, a “sense” (5) or “a
universal ideal to which we aspire” (7). This does not, however, result in the
abandonment of the concept, but instead fuels the desire to remake the shattered idea of a
house into an actual home. Like Charles Scruggs in Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the
Afro-American Novel (1993), Sweeny cites the city as the desired “home” in African
American literature. However, the only successful construction of home Sweeny
encounters in her study is that of Morrison’s Song of Solomon in which a strong African
American community must embody its opposite in order to continue fighting for unstable
home. The multiple shortcomings of the city to deliver the desired home have returned
African American literature to the rural South in search of a place with which to identify,
in search of a physical and spiritual connection to home, not a house.
36
In all, the term “place-based identity” therefore signifies the tight connection
between the physical space occupied and the construction of identity that reflects that
place. The conceptualization of identities relative to place is an attribute of return
migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era. Migrants are depicted separating northernurban and southern-rural identities. These identities become so rooted to place that the
migrants have difficulty moving them. I argue that return migration novels of the postCivil Rights era disrupt the fixed identities by questioning their boundaries and the
rigidity with which they are defined.
Chapter Outlines
Structurally and discursively, the chapters of this dissertation move from the rerepresentation of the Civil Rights Movement in the South—in which the South becomes a
space of redefinition—to narrations of the eventual reconciliation, stability, and
wholeness of the self. Thus, the chapters follow a thematic instead of a chronological
progression in order to construct a larger view of the South present in contemporary
African American return migration novels. All of the texts I am dealing with are written
after 1975. This time frame enables me to address the change in the literary treatment of
the South following the Civil Rights Movement and African American literature’s
participation in reconstructing that image. Although not all return migration novels of the
post-Civil Rights era include physical returns, returns to the South occur in all of the
studied texts, though it occasionally requires a redefining of what qualifies as the North.
There are instances of metaphorical, psychological returns, as seen in Morrison’s Jazz
(1992), or spiritual returns, exemplified in Tina McElroy Ansa’s Baby of the Family
(1989). Like the physical returns, these symbolic journeys back are and can be just as
37
meaningful, powerful, and transformative for African American characters, male and
female.
For most of the focal novels, the Civil Rights Movement appears on the
periphery, either in moments where it is specifically mentioned as a past event or when a
character has an encounter that invokes the Movement. Its consistent presence, however,
shows an acknowledgement of the Movement’s importance to the development of this
sub-genre of migration novels. Chapter One focuses, accordingly, on the return migration
novels of the post-Civil Rights era that are temporally set during the Civil Rights
Movement. These novels situate the foundation upon which those stories set after the
Civil Rights Movement build. In many ways, the stakes are much higher for the
characters who return to the South during the Civil Rights Movement than for those who
return afterwards. The main texts for this chapter are Walker’s Meridian and Andrews’s
Baby’s Sweets. Andrews and Walker both depict the return of black female characters to
the rural South and position the Civil Rights struggle around these characters’ ability to
regain control over their own bodies. In Baby Sweet’s, the control in question is related to
sexual exploitation of black women by white men in the South, while in Meridian it is a
question of psychological control over the body that is sacrificed for the well-being of the
black community. Treating these two novels together creates a multifaceted image of
women who, after participating in formal Civil Rights activities, practice forms of
resistance that are more suited to their individual needs and beliefs. Additionally, each
novel speculates about a definable end to the Movement indicated by a symbolic change.
Following the Civil Rights Movement, African American literature begins to
reconsider accepted attitudes about the North and the South. Thus, Chapter Two moves
38
from the more categorical juxtaposition of the urban North and the rural South in
Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow to the confusion of a South that is both urban and
rural in Jones’s Leaving Atlanta. At the forefront of these two novels is the importance of
place, as Marshall and Jones consider assumptions about the urban and the rural, and
correspondingly about the North and the South. Both authors depict the difficulties their
characters face with place-based identities that have been informed by misconceptions
about the urban-North and the rural-South.
Chapters Three and Four look at the community’s role and the individual’s role in
the process of self-definition within the space of the South. In chapter three, I explore the
significance of community in Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits and Ansa’s Ugly Ways. The
loss of communities fostered by segregation in the post-Civil Rights era is a point of
concern with critics of contemporary African American literature. Kenan and Ansa are
amongst the black writers that have responded to that concern by developing fictional
black communities that serve as the setting for all their texts: Tims Creek for Kenan, and
Mulberry for Ansa. I examine repercussions of community-defined identities that do not
leave room for individual self-definition. Both A Visitation of Spirits and Ugly Ways call
for new configurations of home, of communities, that support rather than police their
members.
Chapter Four culminates the trajectory of my project. It situates characters making
permanent returns to the South in order to repair and meld their fractured selves. I focus
on Naylor’s Mama Day and Morrison’s Home as their characters bring together
community-defined identity and individual self-definition. In that mending, fusion, and
self-(re)definition, place is important to the characters, independent of community.
39
Within the space of the South, the characters must make personal journeys through their
pasts and experiences to define stable identities from which their future subjectivities can
develop.
40
CHAPTER I. THE BLACK WOMAN’S BODY AND THE SOUTHERN CIVIL
RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN RAYMOND ANDREWS’S BABY SWEET’S
AND ALICE WALKER’S MERIDIAN
African American return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era do not all
directly address the Civil Rights Movement in their narratives. However, the thematic
shift in the depiction of the South in African American migration novels—from those of
the Great Migration during the Jim Crow era to those of the return migration during the
post-Civil Rights era—positions the Civil Rights Movement as a crucial moment in
authorial reimagining of the South in African American literature. As such, the Civil
Rights Movement appears both centrally and tangentially to the plots of return migration
novels, whether the stories are set temporally during the Civil Rights Movement or after
it. For example, texts such as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and Home (2012),
Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Tina McElroy Ansa’s Baby of the
Family (1989)19 are positioned during the Civil Rights Movement and their characters’
experiences are directly related to the surrounding events. Others such as Gloria Naylor’s
Mama Day (1988), Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989)20, Tayari Jones’s
Leaving Atlanta (2002), and Alice Randall’s Rebel Yell (2010) are located following the
Civil Rights Movement with brief references that critique the progress of the Movement
in relation to their characters’ current conditions.
19
The return migration that occurs in Ansa’s novel is not a physical return but a temporal return in which
the main character’s interaction with spirits moves her spatially through time and through alternate
understandings of the South.
20
As will be discussed in Chapter 2 with Jones’s novels, the North of Kenan’s novel is that of the urban
space and his main character’s return is to his smaller more rural hometown.
41
This chapter focuses on two return migration novels set during the Civil Rights
Movement, Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) and Raymond Andrews’s Baby Sweet’s
(1983). Revisiting an earlier time, these texts directly engage with the Movement. In
addition, and perhaps more importantly, they judge the Movement’s success in relation to
its black female characters’ reclamation of their bodies from the volatile Civil Rights
South to which they return.
The return to earlier time periods in the return migration novels of the post-Civil
Rights era represents an attempt to revise our understandings of the events involved in the
return to the South. In Neo-Segregation Narratives (2010) Brian Norman identifies a
specific tradition in African American literature of the post-Civil Rights era in which
narratives are temporally set during United States’ segregation. He terms this literary
tradition, neo-segregation narratives. He asserts that “While segregation narratives
attempted to revise America’s racial script, neo-segregation novels continue that effort in
revising Jim Crow’s history” (9). The revision Norman argues is occurring in these neosegregation narratives is also present African American return migration narratives of the
post-Civil Rights era that position their characters’ returns in relation to the Civil Rights
Movement, and in so doing engage with, complicate, or revise the history and events of
the Movement. These African American return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights
era, which overlap with Norman’s concept of neo-segregation narratives, feature
characters returning to the South prior to21 and during the Civil Rights Movement in
21
Such as Andrews’s Appalachee Red (1978) in which the main character, Red, returns to the South in the
mid-1940s. Additionally, separate from the return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era and
Norman’s concept of neo-segregation narratives, neo-slave narratives also feature characters who return
from the North, such as Morrison’s Paul D from Beloved (1987), or characters who reach the northern edge
of the South and return to the deep South, such as in Shirley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986). The
temporal scope of my project does not allow for the discussion of neo-slave narratives, but it is important to
note that those characters who return to the South in neo-slave narratives are driven by similar purposes:
42
order to fight for a place for themselves and for communities in which they have personal
investment. As such, the Movement is positioned in direct connection with the migration
of the mid-twentieth century. In her study The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), Isabel
Wilkerson argues correctly that the loss of black southerners, “through the sheer weight
of [the Great Migration], helped push the country towards the civil rights revolutions of
the 1960s” (9). African American return migration narratives of the post-Civil Rights era
address the link between migration and the Civil Rights Movement by placing those who
return from the North at the center of the Movement in the South. This return is not
driven by a rejection of the North, but by a desire to fight for the space of the South.
The attention paid to the Civil Rights Movement in African American return
migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era is also integral to the work of revising the
space of the South in the African American literature. As hinted in the introduction,
African American literary imagination of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century
largely equates the South with Jim Crow laws. As a result, Jim Crow with its myriad
impacts on black life permeates African American narratives engaging with the South.22
The reclamation of the South by many black writers, however, involves a re-envisioning
of the South beyond the prior parameters of Jim Crow. Post-Civil Rights era black writers
add to that literary re-representation of the South by situating their narratives in earlier
time periods—from the antebellum South through the Jim Crow South—to construct
the search for people, place, and home, or to fight against the system at work while asserting their
subjectivities. For more on neo-slave narratives see Ashraf H. A. Rushdy’s Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies
in the Logic of a Literary Form (1999), Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu’s Black Women Writers and the American
Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (1999), and Arlene R. Keizer’s Black Subjects: Identity
Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (2004).
22
From James Weldon Johnson’s novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) to Richard Wright’s
autobiographical sketches “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1937) to Alice Childress’s play Wedding
Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966).
43
narratives that exist alongside and thematize the history of southern violence and
oppression without the immediate need to focus on those issues.
Critics have noted that the reimagining of the South in the post-Civil Rights era is
a project led by black women writers, many of whom portray the region as a space of
healing. Trudier Harris argues in The Scary Mason-Dixon Line (2009) that one of the
main differences in the treatment of the South by black men and women writers is at the
literal site of the body with the historical legacies of lynching and rape in the South. She
claims that generally black men writers have more discomfort towards the South because
the violence resulting in death could not be overcome, whereas “black women and black
female characters, even after rape, move on with their lives”23 (7). Harris contends that
beyond just the ability for female characters to move on with their lives, the message
conveyed is “Wherever one finds one’s self on southern soil, these women writers posit,
the possibility exists for transcendence without permanent damage to the psyche” (15). I
would add to this assertion that not only does the likelihood of transcendence exist on
southern soil, but that the writers suggest that the space of the South is a necessary
component in the reconstitution of the self, especially in African American novels of the
post-Civil Rights era.
It is important to also note that twentieth-century black male writers have also
focused on black female characters’ ability to inhabit the space of the South. For instance,
Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923)—arguably the most canonical African American text
depicting the South—is populated with black female characters that are relatively
23
Harris notes that she is not opening up a conversation about who suffered more—black men or black
women—but that there are important differences in the way each type of physical assault can be addressed
by its victims and/or witnesses. Furthermore, it is the difference in the ways in which black male and
female writers treat the violence in their writing that leads her to focus on this specific piece of southern
history present in the literature.
44
stationary in the South, while black male characters move between the North and South,
but are unable to successfully inhabit the South, as shown most clearly in Kabnis’s failed
return to the South in Cane’s final section. In Masculinist Impulses (2005), Nathaniel
Grant claims Toomer portrays black women as the beauty of the South and black men as
those who would ignorantly or willingly partake in that destruction. Additionally, he
notes Toomer racializes specific spaces through the use of female characters: “A darker
black womanhood can represent the rich dark earth of the country while a feminized
whiteness stands for the shining city; the black man in Cane is generally suspended
between these” (37). In both cases, the women are positioned as objects24 with which the
men struggle as they move within and between the spaces of the North and the South.
The black female characters are thus equated with the physical space of the South and its
black folk life and culture.
African American literature of the post-Civil Rights era by both black men and
women writers attempts to revise earlier problematic portrayals of black female
characters in the South as objects. The response by black writers in the return migration
novels of the post-Civil Rights era shifts from casting male protagonists in the Great
Migration to the North to highlighting female protagonists in the return migration to the
South. Black female characters are no longer represented as stationary objects of the
South but rather mobile subjects that choose the South. As moving subjects, the black
female characters conceive and enact change in southern communities while positioning
themselves as individuals. Additionally, those returning to the South of the Civil Rights
24
Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” (1983) also questions Toomer’s depiction
and understanding of black women in his writing. She suggests his treatment of black women presents them
as spiritually oppressed to the point of emptiness. Walker challenges this representation in her essay and, as
we will see, explores the issue in her novel Meridian (1976).
45
Movement confront the gendered revolutionary attitudes propagated by Black
Nationalism through the tactics they use to bring about change in their communities.
Madhu Dubey claims that “As a symbolic locus of the undesirable past, then, the black
woman was excluded from the ‘new’ political agenda of black nationalistic discourse”
(20). As we shall see, these black female characters respond to the revolutionary
activities and organizations that fail to meet their needs by independently working for the
cause they find most compelling in a manner that best fits their own beliefs and
situations.
This chapter looks at the ways Alice Walker and Raymond Andrews illustratively
return to the 1960s as they revise the history of Jim Crow at the site of black women’s
literal bodies in their respective novels Meridian and Baby Sweet’s. Walker and Andrews
couch the success of the Civil Rights Movement in the South as the black woman
attaining control over her own body after returning to the South. Walker’s critique of the
expectations placed on women by both their communities and Civil Rights organizations
manifests as Meridian’s physical and mental sacrifice to fight civil rights injustices even
after the Movement is supposedly over, while Andrews uses humor as he pushes the limit
of objectification of black female characters while moving them towards subjectivity. His
depiction of prostitution in Baby Sweet’s, and sexual assaults in his earlier novels, draws
attention to the historical sexual violence and exploitation of black women in the South
upon which he comments. I argue that Walker and Andrews both use the framework of
the return migration to recognize black women’s significant roles within the Civil Rights
Movement. The women play major parts, both formally, as a part of the Movement, and
subversively, as independent contributors. Walker and Andrews are also concerned to
46
acknowledge a change in the South that allows their female characters to reclaim their
bodies from the violence and exploitation in the region. The point here, then, is that the
focal texts depict the return migration as an act, a decision, motivated by the returnee’s
desire to take a stand in the South for the benefit of both the community and the
individual.
Andrews’s narrator marks the end of Jim Crow on the 4th of July 1966 with his
main character, Lea, bringing Jim Crow to an end by redefining the parameters of her
sexual activity in order to gain a new form of control over her body through her sexuality.
In other words, it is through Lea’s rejection of prostitution and reclaiming of her body
and her own sexual pleasure that signal a significant change in Andrews’s South.
Walker’s main character, Meridian, is still fighting for Civil Rights into the 1970s. This
fight manifests as mental and emotional control over her body that positions the
reclamation of her body as a psychological act. These two characters return to the South
in search of their individual identities and their identities within their communities. In
addition to revising the South of the African American literary imagination, the novels
under study represent it as a site that has more to offer these characters than does the
North, specifically in terms of enabling them to define and actualize their selves on their
own terms.
Even though Walker’s Meridian was published before Andrews’s Baby Sweet’s I
start with Andrews’s novel for three reasons. One, the chronology of Andrews’s narrative
begins and ends before Walker’s narrative, since Walker extends Meridian’s Civil Rights
Movement into the 1970s. Two, the chapter moves inwards discursively: its direction is
from the interactions between the white and black community members in Andrews’s
47
narrative to those among the black community members and the revolutionaries in
Walker’s narrative. And finally, the intersectionality of Lea and Meridian’s experiences
can be read together progressively. Lea’s resistance comes through her manipulation of
her sexuality for sexual revenge, while Meridian shuts down her sexuality, after it betrays
her multiple times. She disconnects from her body to withstand her form of protest.
Neither of these choices are viable for the women; instead, the culminating events of the
novels are what actually allow the women to regain control over their bodies. Towards
the end of Baby Sweet’s, Lea sees her actions through a different light and reconsiders her
own tactics regarding the use of her body, while Meridian also questions the
physiological suffering she has willingly endured.
Before analyzing Lea’s return from the North and her relationship to the end of
Jim Crow, we should situate Baby Sweet’s in relation to the Muskhogean County trilogy
to which it belongs. Like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and Tina McElroy
Ansa’s Mulberry County, Muskhogean County is a fictional county of Andrews’s
creation. It is located in Georgia near Atlanta and is the setting of his novels Appalachee
Red (1978), Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee (1981), and Baby Sweet’s. The majority of
the trilogy takes place from the early 1900s through 1966, though many of the characters’
family histories recounted stretch back to the 1800s and the beginnings of Muskhogean
County reaches back to the 1600s. Appalachee Red focuses on the fictional town of
Appalachee and develops both the black and white communities that occupy that space,
Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee centers on the rural community of Plain View located
outside Appalachee, and Baby Sweet’s brings the storylines from the first two novels
together, back in the town of Appalachee.
48
Baby Sweet’s tells the story of Rosiebelle Lee’s granddaughter Lea and of John
Morgan Jr., the son of the town’s white patriarch John Morgan Sr. Appalachee Red’s
girlfriend and owner of all of his property and possessions in Appalachee, Baby Sweet,
partners with John Morgan Jr. to open a brothel after “Red’s” café fails from a lack of
customers due to the success of integration. Lea rides into town on the day of the
brothel’s, “Baby Sweet’s,” grand opening. As with the preceding novels, Baby Sweet’s
brings the sexual exploitation of women to the forefront of the narrative. At the end of the
first novel, Red succeeds in killing Baby Sweet’s white rapist, Sherriff “Boots” White,
who represents the rise of the poor white class in the South following Reconstruction, but
he fails to bring down John Morgan Sr., who represents the old moneyed South of the
antebellum period. Andrews returns his final novel to Appalachee to once again
challenge John Morgan Sr.’s reign over the southern town, this time through the character
of Lea.
Andrews positions the trilogy’s narrator as a storyteller from within these
communities which both breaks the narrative’s linearity and helps develop the complex
relationships that exist between the community members, both black and white. Each
time a new place or character, no matter how minor, is introduced, the plot’s trajectory is
paused for a rich, in depth history. This technique, along with Andrews’s use of call-andresponse, functions to construct a playfully ironic narrative that addresses both the violent
history of the South and the deeply rooted black communities that inhabit the space. At
the heart of Andrews’s writing is humor. As Trudier Harris observes, “Andrews is in the
writing game for the sheer fun of it […] and he gets his fun by laughing at his characters
and the circumstances in which they find themselves just as much as he laughs with
49
them” (emphasis original, Scary 197). Andrews voiced on multiple occasions his deep
love of the South25 and his desire to depict the strength of the people who occupy the
space and the pleasure they experience in life. He does not, however, shy away from the
difficult circumstances faced in the South; instead, he uses humor to create “voices and
characters whose slightly altered notes of oppression provide us with fresh looks at
much-worn southern territory” (Harris, Scary 196). In order to do so, Andrews narrator
and fictional community construct stereotypes around the novel’s characters and pushes
those stereotypes to the limits, while at the same time Andrews develops his characters
outside of those imposed stereotypes as he shows their complexities and that they
embody few if any of the qualities present in the community’s imagination of them.
In working with Andrews’s novels, critics have focused on his stories’ attention to
issues of masculinity.26 Some reviewers have even gone as far as subordinating women in
his novels by adamantly stating Andrews’s trilogy is about men,27 both black and white.
It is accurate that Andrews’s trilogy is also about men because Andrews spends time
developing and depicting whole communities of individuals; I contend, however, that
women are actually his focus. Andrews even states in his preface to Baby Sweet’s that
“This book is not about Baby Sweet. Appalachee Red is about Baby Sweet. This book is
about Lea” (x). His main black female characters drive the majority of the narratives and
it is their stories and experiences that dominate his novels. One of the experiences these
black female characters share is what the narrator calls the “white-man-black-woman
love affair, a then-prevalent Southern pastime” (Appalachee 7). This ironic “love affair”
25
See Andrews’s introduction to Appalachee Red and his article “The Necessity of Blacks’ Writing Fiction
About the South” (1993).
26
Trudier Harris’s “This Disease Called Strength: The Masculine Manifestation in Raymond Andrews’s
Appalachee Red” (2001) and South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (2002).
27
Keith Byerman’s Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction (2005).
50
the narrator refers to is the rape of black women in the South by their white employers
and other white men in positions of power, a practice dating back to slavery.28 Danielle
McGuire acknowledges this sexual violation of black women in the South as the impetus
for the Civil Rights Movement in her study At the Dark End of the Street (2010).
McGuire addresses the lack of justice black women received when reporting the crimes
or even attempting to defend themselves. In Andrews’s trilogy, this violation is rarely
acknowledged as rape by those in power, the narrator, or the victims themselves.
The depiction of sexual assault across the trilogy positions the self-reclamation of
the black woman’s body at the end of the final novel, Baby Sweet’s, as a pivotal symbolic
turning point in the history of the South. In Appalachee Red, Andrews depicts the sexual
coercion of Little Bit by her white employer John Morgan Sr. (7-10), which results in her
pregnancy and the destruction of her marriage to Big Man Thompson; and, the main
character, Baby Sweet, escapes the sexual advances of her white employer Mist’ Ed at his
plantation only to enter into brutal and ritualized rapes by the chief of police “Boots”
White (81-85), followed by her sexual relationship with Red which does not begin with a
clear act of consent (92). In Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, Andrews depicts
Rosiebelle Lee’s resistance to the advances of her white employer’s oldest son as the
impetus for the castration of her fiancé Willie Henry, followed by her untold sexual
experiences that result in children she does not claim as her own and leaves scattered
across the South as the shame of white men (237-239). Finally, in Baby Sweet’s,
Andrews depicts the rape of white trash Betty Jean by a middle-aged preacher as her
28
See Deborah Gray White’s Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), Crystal N.
Feimster’s Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (2011), and Danielle
McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil
Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (2010) for discussions of black women’s
rapes in the South from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement.
51
multi-racial baby, Lea, lies in the dirt beside her (258). Little Bit and Rosiebelle Lee are
of the same generation, born prior to the 1900s, and both are working as maids when their
assaults occur. Baby Sweet and Betty Jean are of the next generation, born in the 1920s,
and they are separately headed to Atlanta in 1945, after leaving their rural homes, in the
hopes of finding opportunities in the city when they encounter their assaulters. Baby
Sweet never makes it to the city, and Betty Jean is outcast once she arrives for having a
multi-racial daughter. Lea is the final generation, born in 1944, and college educated in
the North. Unlike the other women, she is not sexually assaulted. Upon returning to the
South, Lea does make it her mission, however, to respond to the sexual exploitation of
women by men, specifically those in positions of significant power.
A college education in the North is one of the main reasons Andrews’s characters
leave the South. The result of the northern college education is that they return—four
years later, without spending any additional time in the North—as leaders of the Civil
Rights Movement. The character Blue, who returns from college to join the freedom
riders in Appalachee Red, is briefly referenced multiple times in Baby Sweet’s as leading
sit-ins for southern integration, which, as I suggested earlier, positions a formal Civil
Rights Movement as the backdrop to Lea’s activities. Initially Lea has no interest in
being physically active in the Movement. As an outcast in her southern community, Lea
is an introvert who spends all her time locked in her room reading. When she moves from
Atlanta, Georgia, to attend the University of Michigan with the desire that living in the
North will free her of her outcast status, her plan is to write the “Great American Novel.”
This plan changes, ironically, when she quickly finds her status in the North the same as
in the South. She reflects that “even up in the North, where they understand the colored
52
problem, I was still a little colored girl with cracker skin and nigger hair” (emphasis
original 149). Lea and Blue find themselves more confined in the North than in the South
because the North attempts to mask its racism which makes it more difficult for the two
of them to confront. This limits both characters’ ability to address their situations there.
As a result, Lea and Blue feel disenchanted with their northern colleges when the
idealized North turns up short. This disempowerment causes them to look back
nostalgically to the South and stake their claims there as opposed to in the North. Both
respond to their frustrations with the North by becoming involved in the Civil Rights
Movement activities in the South.
Lea’s experience in the North transforms her; she leaves her books behind for
physical involvement in the Movement. Lea recalls, “‘I got caught up and became—some
thought overly—active in the Civil Rights Movement. Back to the South, baby. Under a
full head of kinky hair I spent all of my summer vacations, and frustrations, marching
through dear ol’ Dixie justifying my coloredness by living the Great American Novel’”
(emphasis original 149). Lea’s drive to justify her “coloredness” comes from her being
continuously outcast, a marginalization she no longer hides from. Yet, as the narrative
infers, the only productive place to respond to her frustration is back in the South. She
also positions the Movement as the material of the Great American Novel, which she no
longer has time to write because she is participating in it. This commitment to the formal
Civil Rights Movement involving Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
marches, however, does not last for Lea. Blue continues the “overly active” status in the
Movement, but Lea abandons it as she internalizes her mother’s experience in relation to
men. Betty Jean’s early and sudden death shifts Lea’s focus from her own experience of
53
race to her mother’s experience with gender. Much like her dissatisfaction with the North
for its shortcomings, Lea realizes to her dismay that the potential success of the
Movement will not address her mother’s treatment by men. The formal organization of
the Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism accompanying it do not provide a
space for Lea to address women’s exploitation in conjunction with racial
discrimination.29 The realities of her mother’s sexual exploitation lead Lea to develop her
own civil rights tactics to meet the needs of her situation. The strategies do not take the
form of protest, as her earlier participation in marches did and as does Blue’s continued
affiliation.
Lea transitions from taking formal action with the organized Civil Rights
Movement to her own form of subversion independent of any organization but reliant on
her perceived sexual power. Avenging her mother is the goal behind her final return to
the South upon her graduation from college. She decides to go after all the men her
mother worked for and then all men generally to disempower and embarrass them
sexually. Lea removes her body as another number in the national Civil Rights
Movement and reassigns it to the local level to exact change, one man at a time. The
sexual violence across the trilogy culminates in Lea’s ability to assert her sexual agency
through the sacrifice and, then, the reclamation of her body. This eventually results in the
destruction of the white patriarchal figure of Appalachee, John Morgan Sr. These female
characters’ recurring incidents of sexual violence come to an end on July 4th 1966, when
29
For historical overviews of black women’s relationships to the Civil Rights Movement and Black
Nationalism see Wahneema Lubiano’s “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves
and Others” (1997), Sisters in the struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power
Movement (2001) and The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (2006).
This issue has also been addressed in reference to other novels by black women writers see Madhu Dubey’s
Black Women and the Nationalist Aesthetic (1994).
54
Lea appears in Muskhogean County to work as a prostitute at Baby Sweet’s, the new
brothel in town. Andrews signals a turning point to centuries of the casual treatment of
sexual violence against black women in the South when John Morgan Sr. dies on top of
Lea in bed.
Scholars have a tendency to focus on the significance of this ending for John
Morgan Sr.’s relationship to the South, rather than its implications for Lea.30 One of the
few exceptions to such a view, Harris notes that “As Appalachee Red’s spiritual sister by
her mixture of black and white blood, Lea inadvertently becomes the avenger that Red
could never become with John Sr.” (Scary 204). In the first novel, Red attempts
unsuccessfully to seek revenge against his biological father, John Morgan Sr., by running
off with and impregnating John Morgan Sr.’s daughter. Red’s use of the white female
body for indirect revenge against John Morgan Sr. fails because Red overestimates the
value of the white female body to John Morgan Sr. John Morgan Sr. responds by keeping
his daughter and grandchild hidden from the rest of the community and, furthermore,
remains unaffected upon learning that Red is also his biological son, thus making the
relationship incestuous. Lea, however, has direct access to John Morgan Sr. through his
desire for her “black” body. At this point in the narrative, her reasons for being with
John Morgan Sr. are not based in revenge and his defeat is unintentional. That Andrews
presents her success in this moment, however, implies the success of the Civil Rights
Movement—specifically Lea’s ability to undermine John Morgan Sr.’s claim to black
women’s bodies—and represents the changing South within the framework of the novel.
30
For example, see Jeffrey Folks’s “‘Trouble’ in Muskhogean County: The Social History of a Southern
Community in the Fiction of Raymond Andrews” (1998).
55
Lea’s ability to signal a change in the social structure of the South largely depends
on her status in the novel as an outsider. Like Walker’s Meridian or Morrison’s Sula, this
position gives her power over the community, which, denied full knowledge of her being,
can only construct its own lore about Lea based on speculation and its own needs.
Positioning her as an outsider, the narrator relies on her physical appearance and an
awareness of how the community will receive her to present her body as hyper
sexualized. The community locates Lea’s power in her body and her sexuality because
she enters its space as the third prostitute at Baby Sweet’s. The community’s need to turn
the white prostitute they call “Motorcycle Momma” into a legend is reflected in the story
surrounding her arrival that passes through the town. According to the narrator, the
gossip in the black male community is that
despite her long straight blond hair and light skin, [she]
right off announced her color as colored and proclaimed
black as “beautiful” by stating flat out to the white man
John Morgan, Junior, that her body was “for colored only,”
and if she wasn’t allowed to serve her own race with it
there in Baby Sweet’s, then she would just get her hat and
motor right on out of Appalachee…the whole damn
whorehouse knew that this here Motorcycle Momma said
exactly what she meant and, Lord, meant exactly what she
said. (emphasis original 116)
Baby Sweet’s is initially segregated, sort of. It originally is structured such that
only white men are allowed access to the black female bodies inside. This early setup
reflects the scheme of the Jim Crow South with its history of white men raping black
women and leaving both the women and the black men in their lives powerless to attain
any form of justice.31 This community, therefore, develops its lore and legends on the
individual’s ability to resist or exert power over the white oppressors, as is the case with
31
Such is the case for Sarah and Silas in Richard Wright’s “Long Black Song” in Uncle Tom’s Children
(1938) and for Little Bit and Big Man in Andrews’s Appalachee Red.
56
their earlier legendary community members, Little Bit, Appalachee Red, and Rosiebelle
Lee. In the male community’s imagination, the pseudo integration of Baby Sweet’s is
only possible by this outsider’s ability to confront the white man, acknowledge her love
of black men with the black-as-beautiful reference, and claim her body as “for colored
only.” Lea’s decision to provide the community’s black men with that which they have
previously been denied places her firmly in the community’s gratitude and memory. For
the black men in the novel, Lea’s transgressive presence at Baby Sweet’s implies a public
acknowledgement of the beginnings of racial and gendered equality based on equal
access to black women’s bodies. Yet, Andrews later shows that the community’s beliefs
and assumptions about Lea’s presence are misinformed because her mission is not about
men having equal access to women’s bodies, but for women to have control over their
own bodies.
Here Lea’s power is imagined by the black community of on lookers, who are
also largely male. The imagined confrontation between Lea and John Morgan Jr. does not
occur. It is significant that Lea’s decision to proclaim her body “for colored only” comes
down to a last-minute realization that the ensuing integration of the Civil Rights
Movement—led in the state by Blue—would shut down the business if Baby Sweet and
John Morgan Jr. do not figure out a way to serve the black population. Lea, overhearing
the conversation, responds “‘I’ll serve the black bread’” (emphasis original 115). At this
point her actual motives are still hidden from readers, and the few lines she speaks
present her as having no interest at all in what happens at Baby Sweet’s, or in issues
connected to the Civil Rights Movement. In must be pointed out that even with the
pseudo-integration of Baby Sweet’s, the black patrons are still prevented from entering
57
through the front door and using the parlor or bar. The black patrons, instead, enter Lea’s
room through a back staircase and exterior door. For the community, however, their
access to her body and to a building they were excluded from minutes earlier is equated
with a shift in power they attribute to the woman they desire. For Andrews’s narrative,
however, the actual shift in power comes when Lea makes her decision to quit her life of
prostitution.
The community’s construction of Lea that places her power in her body and
sexuality is not entirely wrong, as readers learn when Andrews makes Lea’s story known.
Two-thirds of the way through the novel the narrator is almost entirely silenced—with
the exception of one paragraph in which the narrator notifies readers that the story of
Appalachee Red is being told at that same moment across town—as Lea takes forty pages
to convey her personal narrative to her new boss, the sympathetic Baby Sweet. Lea has
the most agency of all of Andrews’s characters because she is afforded the space to
account for her own story; in the earlier novels, the equally puzzling Appalachee Red is
given only two pages for his narrative and Rosiebelle Lee is allotted fifteen pages for
hers. It is here that readers get the story of Betty Jean’s rape after she is ostracized from
her family for having a black baby. As Lea’s mother, Betty Jean is subsequently outcast
from the white community in Atlanta after Lea’s hair changes its consistency not too long
after she begins school, visually marking her as black. After Lea becomes racially
marked, Betty Jean finds herself in similar employment situations as female characters
from the earlier novels, Little Bit and Rosiebelle Lee; she can only get hired if she gives
her employers the rights to her body.
58
In response to the treatment of her mother, which she views as causing her
mother’s early death, Lea decides to first seek out these men and attain sexual revenge on
them, and then decides even to go after all men in general, though she frequently seeks
white men in positions of power. It is from Lea’s self-narration that readers come to
know her and understand not only the impetus for her work as a prostitute, but that
contrary to the community’s impressions of her, her mission is really one that is less
connected to the Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism, and more concerned
with seeking justice for the sexual exploitation of women, 32 not about serving black men.
It is not her ability to work as a prostitute, however, that signals a change in the South; it
is her self-sexual exploitation that helps her discover what she is really fighting for and
how to achieve it by reclaiming her body.
Through her personal narrative, Lea reveals her own awareness of the power her
body, when understood and correctly utilized, now has or can have over men. Lea recalls,
“‘it didn’t take me long to discover in tracking down Momma’s killers that God, despite
being a man and perhaps unsuspected by Him at the time, from the deal dealt woman the
single most powerful weapon the world has ever known—the pussy, or the promise of it.
And, honey, I used both’” (emphasis original 170). Her revenge on her mother’s past
employers involves not just her awareness of the power of her body, but her intent and
ability to use those powers. Lea’s initial actions do not take the form of prostitution
because they do not include any exchange beyond personal satisfaction; the switch to
financial transaction happens only after she has avenged her mother’s death. Her
32
This theme is also explored in other texts by black writers. For example, Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man (1987)
recounts the experiences of its titular character from her jail cell as she recalls the various sexual assaults
experienced by herself and other women in her life, which culminates in her killing and biting off a man’s
penis.
59
retaliation against her mother’s past employers also does not necessarily involve any
sexual contact. Lea’s goal is public sexual embarrassment that works to emasculate the
men. She is able to use men’s desire and the “promise of pussy” to destroy the men’s
families, businesses, and sanity as she walks away without giving them what they
actually want. It is her ability to elude any sexual situation she finds herself in that begins
to separate Lea from her female predecessors whose opportunities were more limited.33
For the black women across the trilogy, it is Lea’s sexual agency, her subversive control
of who has access to her body that symbolizes a shift in the historical systems of the
South.
Unbeknownst to Lea, her attitude towards her body and the use of her sexuality is
similar to her grandmother’s, Rosibelle Lee, with the one main difference being
Rosiebelle Lee’s lack of sexual agency. Where Lea successfully combats a pimp to
maintain her autonomy, Rosiebelle Lee’s repeated resistance to her employer’s oldest
son—which finally escalates to her pulling a knife on him to protect her self—results in
the castration of her fiancé Willie Henry. While Lea can decide who she has sex with and
why, Rosiebelle Lee realizes she lacks such ownership of her own body. In response to
that realization, Rosiebelle Lee travels across the South no longer resisting sexual
advances of white men with power. Like Lea, nonetheless, she finds her own revenge in
leaving illegitimate children on the doorsteps of their fathers’ wives. Rosiebelle Lee’s
response to her sexual exploitation is also public shaming of the men. Although she does
not have Lea’s agency, Andrews presents her exoticized physical appearance as giving
her more power over her situation than she would have otherwise.
33
For reflections on women’s power in the field of sex work see the collection Whores and Other Feminists
(1997).
60
Both Lea and Rosiebelle Lee are exoticized and fetishized by the black and white
communities of Muskhogean County. Rosiebelle Lee’s arrival in Appalachee is initially
racially ambiguous, as is her appearance hours later at Plain View. This uncertainty
instantly gives Rosiebelle Lee power over those around her. Both the black community of
Appalachee and the black community of Plain View question her racial background. The
black men Rosiebelle Lee encounters in Appalachee are mesmerized by her because
“Though her skin was a smooth acorn-brown, she was definitely not like any colored
woman the old eyes squinting out from the shade of Blackshear’s porch had ever hit on
before that hot Georgia summer afternoon back in 1906” (Rosiebelle 3). The “acornbrown” of her skin suggests to her watchers that she is a “colored woman,” but her
physical features and the manner she holds herself are unknown to the old men of
Appalachee. Rosiebelle Lee represents something new and unknown for the Appalachee
residents. Following Rosiebelle Lee’s departure from Appalachee, her co-workers at
Plain View see her as a “strange, non-nigger-looking new servant” (9). Like the old men
of Appalachee, the black women working at the Plain View mansion also question her
look as “strange” and cannot personally relate to her physical appearance. Rosiebelle
Lee’s long straight hair and olive skin tone combined with her air of importance imbue
her with almost immediate power over the mansion workers of Plain View.
It is ironic that the same questionable features that place Rosiebelle Lee as an
oddity and outsider in the black communities are what provide her power over its white
residents as well. Even when there are not any employment openings in Plain View,
True to her words she had gotten herself hired immediately
to a “house” job by none other than the lady of the house
herself, Missis Bea, well known for her fetish for pretty and
exotic things. Missis Bea felt her plantation house would be
61
greatly ornamented by the addition to her domestic staff of
this unusually pretty—but a mite mystic looking—barefoot
negress with the long straight black-as-coal shiny hair
hanging down her back. (emphasis original 8-9)
It is Rosiebelle Lee’s visual appearance that inspires Missis Bea to create a job for her.
Missis Bea’s “fetish for pretty and exotic things” is generally met with items from abroad
that she brings in to decorate her home. Extending this “fetish” to the “unusually pretty”
and “mystic looking” Rosiebelle Lee suggests Missis Bea’s desire to classify Rosiebelle
Lee as an “exotic” foreigner that it is socially acceptable to be captivated by, instead of a
light skinned black woman that Missis Bea is socially not suppose to envy. This
depiction of Rosiebelle Lee as “exotic” foreigner allows her to charm Missis Bea and
take over Missis Bea’s responsibilities as lady of the house, giving Rosiebelle Lee power
over all of the workers at Plain View. She eventually extends this power to Missis Bea’s
son, Mister Mac whom she chooses to provide for her and to have her own children with.
The oppression Lea experiences in the South as a child and adolescent differs
from that of the other women in the trilogy because it is not an experience of sexual
assault; instead, as the narrator suggests, hers is one of racial exclusion of a white body
marked with blond kinky hair. A key component to Lea’s sexual power over the men she
encounters is her ability to physically present her body as either black or white. Upon her
arrival in Appalachee, she wears a wig of long straight blond hair, which initially causes
confusion as to why a white woman is entering Baby Sweet’s. After the announcement
that she is black, her whiteness functions as a sexual fetish for the black men who line up
around the alley for their turn with her. Her whiteness is too much for her customers as
each leaves shamefaced and silent. Readers eventually learn that some, if not all, of them
prematurely ejaculate into a wash cloth as she ritualistically cleanses each one when they
62
enter her room. The black men’s fetishization of her white body leaves them unable to
access it once they are alone with her.
Alternately, the sexual fetishization of the white man for the black female body
that consumes much of the novel, with artist John Morgan Jr.’s obsession with black
women’s nipples, reappears in the final pages when John Morgan Sr., the most respected
man in town, sees wigless Lea’s blond afro and desires only her. Just as the wig of long
straight blond hair is important to her black customers, her natural hair is important to
John Morgan Sr. Lea realizes that “more to her surprise, and secret delight, he appeared
more fascinated by her kinks than her cunt, running his hand through…and through…and
through…her hair. This, she felt, was what really got him ready” (emphasis original Baby
211). John Morgan Sr. forces Lea to question her knowledge about the power of her body
and sexuality. His obsession with her hair is a secret delight to her because, as a child, the
southern community’s inability to reconcile her skin tone with her hair equaled her
rejection. In this final scene, Lea discovers the power racial constructions have over
human behavior.
At the end of her personal narrative, Lea frees herself from her commitment to
sexual revenge and hatred towards men. She reveals that while taking a break she visited,
her grandmother, Rosiebelle Lee’s grave for the first time and promised her that she
would never prostitute herself again. She finishes her story with a thank you and an
apology to Baby Sweet “‘Please, let me say I didn’t walk in here begging for pity or
advice…just an ear...an understanding woman’s ear. That’s all. And you’ve graciously
provided it. Thanks a heap […] I’m sincerely sorry and beg your forgiveness. But right
now my heart ain’t into whoring” (emphasis original 181). Lea tells her story in order to
63
be heard and understood by another woman. To readers, it allows her to show the way in
which she understands her own sexual agency to be functioning, rather than leaving it
constructed by the community as it is earlier. This self-narration prepares her to let go of
her past, with her goal changing from the destruction of men to the reconstruction of her
self by finding her father’s family. Lea is ready to move from outsider to insider. She
realizes that such a move begins with further self-actualization involving constructing a
personal narrative on her own needs, separate from her dead mother’s.
It is telling that before leaving, however, Lea goes back on her promise to her
grandmother by taking one last customer, John Morgan Sr., as a tribute to her mother.
This is the scene in which Lea’s reclamation of her body and sexuality destroys the white
patriarch of the southern town. While having sex with John Morgan Sr., she thinks about
the reasons for her decision, justifying her actions to herself:
I lied about needing the money […] but felt I was doing a
favor to John Junior, who was the only person who helped
Momma when her own daddy kicked her out, all because of
me, and she had nobody else in the world to turn to. That’s
why I didn’t really whore anymore. And for John Junior’s
daddy I even went all out, tried to enjoy it myself for a
change. (emphasis original 209)
No longer driven by revenge, Lea’s sexual agency becomes even more powerful. Her
rationalization of her decision to have sex with John Morgan Sr. after she has quit the life
of prostitution reinforces her sexual agency. Her claim that she “didn’t really whore
anymore” signifies that she does not have sex with John Morgan Sr. because he wants her
body and can pay for it, but because she wants him to have access to it for her own
personal reasons. She is able to identify this sexual interaction with John Morgan Sr. as
anything she wants because she is in control of it. Lea’s sexual power in this final scene
64
comes from her choice to go “all out” and try “to enjoy it [herself] for a change.” In
consenting to this act and in seeking and deriving pleasure from it, Lea subordinates and
thus implicitly removes John Morgan Sr.’s sexual power that, in the past, is based on
force and money. He thinks he is just paying a prostitute here, but Lea’s motives take that
monetary authority from him.
Initially in this scene, Andrews suggests John Morgan Sr.’s lack of direct access
to Lea, due to her retirement and her ability to reject him if she chooses, marks the
beginning of the end of his power. Perhaps more important, it finally and allegorically
highlights a space for change within the southern social structure. As with her other
clients, Lea is in control of the situation; her reasons for having sex with John Morgan
Sr., however, have nothing to do with him and his power, but everything to do with her
own emotional healing. It is this change in attitude that is significant when John Morgan
Sr. dies atop her.
John Morgan Sr.’s death must necessarily accompany Lea’s emotional healing.
He symbolizes the lingering attitudes of the Old South and the New South of Jim Crow;
he has actively participated in sexual assaults on black female characters and has
passively been involved in maintaining the problematic southern social structures by not
only refusing to acknowledge any problems but also through his indifference towards his
cardinal role in creating the problems. It is John Morgan Sr. refusal to acknowledge his
culpability that, by believing himself indestructible, leaves him susceptible to Lea’s
power. Lea’s healing and the future of the community are dependent on the death of the
Old South and New Jim Crow South. John Morgan Sr.’s death symbolically frees the
town of its remaining oppressor.
65
John Morgan Sr.’s death seals Lea’s status as the ultimate legend of Appalachee
and the most important character in Andrews’s trilogy. Lea’s knowledge and tactical
displays of sexual agency represent the possibilities for black women to regain control
over their bodies in the South if the Civil Rights Movement is successful. This sexual
agency’s destruction of John Morgan Sr. helps finally bring down the oppressive
southern hierarchy and open the New post-Civil Rights South. Andrews’s setting this
event on the fourth of July ironically draws attention to celebrations of Independence
Day. Finally, on this Independence Day of 1966, Lea’s subversive revolutionary actions
give the black community a deserved stake in the national holiday.
Andrews’s trilogy is particularly important to our fullest understanding of the
change in African American literature of the post-Civil Rights era that re-imagines a
South specifically connected to black female characters and largely addressed by black
women writers. It suggests a significant change in the way black women’s bodies and
sexual agency exist in the New post-Civil Rights South. Andrews is one of the few
contemporary black men writers who position the South as a space with the potential for
healing. Although Lea does not reconcile her identity by the end of the novel, it is clear
that she has set the steps in motion and that recovery is her new project. She now has the
knowledge and experience to define her identity more complexly.
While Baby Sweet’s depicts Lea instigating a turning point for the Civil Rights
Movement in the town of Appalachee through her destruction of the old southern white
man, Meridian contrastively removes sexual exchange from Meridian’s life early on with
her rejection of her sexual urges that betray her with pregnancy on more than one
occasion. Early on in the novel Meridian redeems her body from men by not forging
66
physical relationships with other men. Like Andrews’s Lea, in reclamation of her body at
the end of the novel, she takes her life back from the black community she dedicated it to
through her civil rights work. While Walker, unlike Andrews, does not mark a specific
end to the Civil Rights Movement, Meridian consciously discovers that moment for
herself by witnessing a change in the community to which she had sacrificed her body.
This community is not specific to one town, like the Appalachee community that claims
Lea, but representative of multiple rural black communities. Meridian questions the idea
of the Civil Rights Movement as both a success and a movement situated nationally and
temporally; the novel suggests, instead, that it is an ongoing event that occurs depending
on the changing psyche of the individual and his/her local community.
Meridian’s thematic concern with black women’s position in black communities
is reflected in the corpus of Walker’s texts. The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
considers the presence of domestic violence within black communities and homes, and
briefly touches on the Civil Rights Movement. Likewise, the canonical The Color Purple
(1982) looks at sexual violence within black communities and families. Although her
work has been criticized for its negative portrayal of black male characters, her
overarching concern is to represent an alternate experience of black female characters,
outside of black-white racial binaries and outside of a masculine Black Nationalist
agenda. Thus, the experience she depicts with her titular character Meridian is one of the
Civil Rights Movement relative to the black woman’s experience within the black
community, both at the national level of the Movement and at the local level through
individual communities’ actions.
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Meridian is structured through a series of vignettes from the third person accounts
around one of the three main characters: Meridian Hill, Truman Held, and Lynne
Rabinowitz. The narrative is predominantly set during the height of the Civil Rights
Movement, the 1950s and the 1960s; however, readers are introduced to Meridian and
Truman in the early 1970s as they debate the successes and failures of the Movement,
along with its definitive conclusion. As the two reflect on Meridian’s present situation
and events of their pasts, Walker revises the history of the Civil Rights Movement to
consider the role and sacrifices of black women in the South. The novel concludes with
Meridian’s self-reclamation after realization that there are fulfilling roles within her
community she can occupy on her own terms without destructive self-sacrifice.
The discrepancy between the formal Civil Rights Movement at the nation level
and the remnants of the informal movement at the local level is an issue Meridian and her
former revolutionary friend Truman discuss directly. Meridian opens with a scene of
Meridian standing in front of a town’s tank in protest of the segregated viewing of a
mummified white woman being marketed as a traveling marvel. Truman, who comes into
town that same day looking for Meridian, witnesses the event and responds with the
observation, “‘But the Civil Rights Movement changed all that!’” (5). From the novel’s
outset Walker begins the project of revisiting and revising the history and purported
accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement by questioning what the Movement
actually achieved and whether or not it is actually over. Truman’s response to the
incident of segregation he encounters upon entering Chicokema, Georgia immediately
positions him as an outsider to the town and, by extension, towns like it. He understands
neither the continuing incidents of small town segregation in the South nor Meridian’s
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reasons for staying in such places. For Truman the Civil Rights Movement is past and
deemed successful enough. This view is responsible for his confusion when watching
scenes from it replay before his very eyes.
Truman is also confused at the outset of the novel due to his inability to
conceptualize the Civil Rights Movement separate from its formal organization.
Meridian’s localized work, after the end of the national Movement, leaves Truman unable
to understand what Meridian might achieve. Truman, like Andrews, tries to periodize the
Movement. As he later reveals, his designated end to the Civil Rights Movement does not
come from success but from resignation: “‘Meridian,’ Truman said. ‘Don’t you realize no
one is thinking about these things any more? Revolution was the theme of the sixties:
[…] The leaders were killed, the restless young were bought off with anti-poverty jobs,
and the clothing styles of the poor were copied by seventh avenue’” (192-193). Truman’s
relegation of revolution to a theme and, then later, to a fad questions the underlying
beliefs of the movement that allow Truman to deduce its defeat to the loss of leaders, the
appeasement of a generation, and the commodification of ideals at the national level.
Meridian’s rejection of material possessions and her lack of concern over her physical
condition help position her outside those Truman identifies as being bought off or
distracted from the cause.
This unwavering dedication to a cause Truman claims is dead and to questions
that no one cares about any longer reflects Meridian’s concern for the well being of the
black community as a whole, and, more specifically, rural black communities less visible
at the national level. Meridian does not condemn Truman for giving up on the Movement.
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She challenges his assertions that it was a passing fad, but does not try to change his
mind. The narrator reflects on Meridian’s stance that
In the end people did what they had to do to survive. The
acquiesced, they rebelled, they sold out, they shot it out, or
they simply drifted with the current of the time, whatever it
was. And they didn’t endanger life and limb agonizing over
what they would lose, which was what separated them from
Meridian. (193)
Meridian is not just interested in surviving. She has done so in the past during her time as
a wife with a child. She seeks out suffering in her dedication to the ideals of passive
resistance connected to the Movement. She also struggles to answer difficult moral
questions which she internalizes to the extent that her body physically decays. This decay
is presented with extreme weight loss, hair loss, acne, yellowing of her eyes, and
blackouts caused by her entire body shutting down directly following her protests.
Meridian is willing to die for the success of the revolution, which is her problem.
When she is brought back to her home after her standoff with the tank, she is unconscious
and in a state of paralysis. Her physical state after years of giving herself entirely over to
the fight for civil rights continues to worsen every year. After not seeing her for a year,
“Her face alarmed [Truman]. It was wasted and rough, the skin a sallow, unhealthy
brown, with pimples across her forehead and on her chin. Her eyes were glassy and
yellow and did not seem to focus at once. Her breath, like her clothes, was sour” (11).
Though her blackouts and paralysis now only coincide with her protests, her body’s
decay is continuous. The community to which she remains an outsider sees her suffering
and attempts to care for her from a distance.
The black community of Chicokema provides Meridian with generous amount of
food and supplies so she can return her health, but she continues to deprive her body.
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Meridian explains that the items provided for her by the town are an acknowledgement of
her work on their behalf. She tells Truman, “They appreciate it when someone volunteers
to suffer” (emphasis original 13). An earlier conversation between Truman and a member
of the community, however, contradicts this assertion. While Truman stands there
marveling at Meridian’s display of bravery and power, one of the town’s people tells him,
“‘as far as I’m concerned, this stuff she do don’t make no sense’” (8). This man’s
inability to comprehend Meridian’s action has to do with his not placing value in the
segregated viewing of the spectacle which she is protesting. He does not understand why
she sacrifices herself for a supposedly ridiculous cause. On the most basic level, he does
not value Meridian’s non-violent, passive resistance form of protest. As Meridian later
discovers, the community does not desire that she willingly suffer. Reflecting that tension
between the collective and the individual, their values and tactics are different from the
passive resistance she is dedicated to from her early civil rights work. Meridian’s tension
with communities is what causes her many movements throughout the novel, each time
searching for individual fulfillment.
Meridian’s migrations to the North and to the South are tied to her involvement in
the Civil Rights Movement. The majority of the novel takes place in the South with
Meridian migrating from a small rural town in Georgia to Atlanta. This first migration is
motivated by her early work registering voters for the Civil Rights organization in her
home town. It is during this initial involvement that Meridian is convinced she can have
more out of life than just motherhood and a failed marriage. She moves to Atlanta for a
college education and to take part in the protests happening in the urban environment.
Similar to Andrews’s Blue and Lea, Meridian’s college education changes her outlook on
71
the world. Her disenchantment, however, is not with the North per se but with her
college’s conservatism. Meridian has an idealized view of education, especially after
losing her access to her high school education at the time of her pregnancy. She and
many of her activist classmates, like Anne Marion, struggle with the college’s position on
the Civil Rights Movement. The official policy is zero tolerance for students and faculty
who participate in Civil Rights Movement activities even though the college
administrators will look the other way. As a very active member in the Civil Rights
Movement and a former wife and mother, Meridian is out of place at her college because
“The emphasis at Saxon was on form, and the preferred ‘form’ was that of the finishing
school girl whose goal, wherever she would later find herself in the world, was to be
accepted as an equal because she knew and practiced all the proper social rules” (91). The
college’s accomodationist practices are in conflict with Meridian’s dedication to helping
those who need it, evidenced in her failed attempts to help Wild Child. Meridian attempts
to mother the independent, homeless, pregnant Wild Child by bringing her to the
university to clothe, feed, and shelter her. Meridian encounters resistance there and Wild
Child is struck by a car and killed while attempting to reclaim her autonomy. After Wild
Child’s death, Meridian fails to attain a burial at the college campus because of its
conservative position and desire to distance itself from everything Wild Child represents.
Meridian also finds herself directly in conflict with the black nationalistic agenda
as she struggles with her tightrope roles as revolutionary and black woman. Karen Stein
asserts, Meridian emphasizes “that the Movement failed to acknowledge women’s
selfhood and thus perpetuated the counterrevolutionary values of a destructive society”
(Stein 129). Additionally, since “black national discourses tended to gender its racial
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subjects as masculine” (Ahokas 482), women directly involved in the movement were
gendered as masculine and deemed undesirable by their male counterparts (Danielson
323). These oppositional concerns lead Meridian to struggle with her own identity as she
attempts to be a black revolutionary woman. Meridian rejects her mother’s model of
traditional motherhood which she has already fallen into because Mrs. Hill’s experience
of “motherhood is inherently oppressive” (Butler-Evans 120). Yet, as she demonstrates
through her interactions with Wild Child, Meridian cannot let go of her desire to mother.
Meridian recognizes her disdain for her son when she is trapped in her home with
him alone all day. Despite this contempt, her unconventional decision to leave her son to
pursue her new found passion with the Civil Rights Movement is not one she takes
lightly. Her attempt to reject the same oppressive form of motherhood her own mother
experiences shows Meridian taking a stand for her position as a black woman because
“motherhood, in Meridian’s world, reflects the abnegation of personal freedom for the
roles defined by men, race, class, and for the responsibilities mandated by poverty and by
children” (Nadel 62). Moreover, Meridian’s desire to participate in the revolution forces
her to give up her son as she learns “that the demands of the political world require she
relinquish her maternal role” (Nadel 61). She is unable, however, to entirely discard her
role as mother when it is mandated by the Movement. It is not necessarily that Meridian
could not be a mother to her son, but that she needs to do so on her own terms, which did
not support staying home with him all day, every day. Likewise, indeed paradoxically,
her struggle within the Movement is that it has no room for the self-sacrificing mother.
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Meridian’s illness and continued physical deterioration comes with her inability to
let go of her role as mother. Before turning into physical decay, her illness begins as
mental distress caused by abandoning her role as mother:
she knew she had broken something, for she began hearing
a voice when she studied for exams, and when she walked
about the academic halls, and when she looked from her
third-floor dormitory window. A voice that cursed her
existence—an existence that could not live up to the
standard of mother hood that had gone before. (88)
This mental anguish Meridian experiences while still in school reflects her connection to
her culture and community. Though she decides to give up her son in order to live her
own life, much like Rose in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, she is still controlled
by the social expectations and changes that equate her actions with poor or failed
mothering. Her susceptibility to these social views she tortures herself with lead her to
her deteriorated state, where “It did not surprise Meridian that her hair came out as she
combed it, any more than it surprised her that her vision sometimes blurred. She was too
driven to notice; and it seemed essential to her then that whatever happened to her she
should be prepared to accept it” (94). Meridian’s passive acceptance of her weakening
physical state mirrors the ideal of passive resistance to an extreme, but also shows her
ability for self-sacrifice as a mother.
Many scholars have suggested that Meridian’s physiological symptoms, both her
blackouts and decaying body, result from her inability to accept her position as a failed
mother34. Her physical symptoms, however, are actually the manifestation of her inability
to reject motherhood. During Meridian’s first paralysis while she is still at school in
34
See Alan Nadel’s “Reading the Body: Alice Walker’s Meridian and the Archeology of Self,” Karen F.
Stein’s “Meridian: Alice Walker’s Critique of Revolution,” and Madhu Dubey’s Black Women Novelist
and the Nationalist Aesthetic.
74
Atlanta, she is cared for by Miss Winters, a woman from her home town. Miss Winters
understands what it means to leave home and go against what is expected of her. In her
delirium, Meridian dreams she is a baby and her mother is holding her over the edge of a
ship but refusing to drop her. She says, “‘Mama, I love you. Let me go,’” to which Miss
Winter responds, “‘I forgive you’” (123). Meridian views herself as an undeserved
weight on her overburdened mother, who herself bears the pressures of traditional
marriage and motherhood. Even when Meridian gives her mother permission to jettison
her in order to save her self, she refuses to do so. Meridian needs the forgiveness Miss.
Winters gives, not for her own rejection of motherhood, but for her self-punishing failure
to let go of it despite being physically freed of her children. Meridian dares to do what
her own mother desired but could not: evading the physical confines of motherhood.
After escaping, however, Meridian realizes she cannot abdicate her role as mother. Thus,
she transfers her self-sacrificing responsibility as a mother to the black community. Her
body’s continuous desire to mother is what she seeks forgiveness for.
Meridian is a mother and her mind will not let her reject that piece of her identity.
Meridian’s attempt to meet the expectations of the revolutionary community to which she
belongs causes her physiological response to her situation. The rigid line drawn between
revolutionary and black woman makes her efforts at being a black revolutionary woman
destructive. She attempts to sacrifice pieces of her identity that she is unable to let go of.
Michael Cook argues that despite her rejection of motherhood by giving up a child and
aborting a child, she “makes the cause of all children, all weak and suffering people, her
own” (152). Her rejection of traditional motherhood ironically leads her to acceptance of
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an alternate form of motherhood: she trades mothering a single child for the symbolic
mothering of various black communities throughout the South.
Meridian clearly gives up a great deal more for the revolution that other members.
Like Andrews’s Blue, Meridian remains officially involved in civil rights activities, from
voter registration to publicly protesting segregation practices. Even after the formal
movement ends, she continues with the practices she has learned. Meridian is genuinely
invested in struggling with the difficult issues such as the “would you kill for the
revolution?” question that causes her to flee the North and return to the South. Meridian’s
inability to answer that question affirmatively separates her from her revolutionary
friends in the North. Ironically, her compatriots that so easily claim they would kill for
the revolution are amongst those that, like Truman, walk away from it. In the ten years
since Meridian left the North, one of the most forceful of her rebellious friends, “AnneMarion, she knew, had become a well-known poet whose poems were about her two
children, and the quality of the light that fell across a lake she owned” (205). This echoes
Nikki Giovanni’s Black Arts Movement poem “For Saundra,” in which the issue is not
that the poem’s figure becomes a poet, but that she/he must write a different type of
poetry that addresses issues relevant to the revolution. Anne-Marion, however, does not
write for or about the revolution she claimed she would kill for which makes her poetry
inconsequential to the Movement.
Walker suggests that Meridian’s inability to answer this question that easily is tied
to her standing as figurative mother to the novel’s southern black communities. Meridian
knows her attachment to the rural South and its people separates her from the
Movements’ other insurgents that do not understand the power of
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the sight of young girls singing in a country choir, their hair
shining with brushings and grease, their voices the voices
of angels. When she was transformed in church it was
always by the purity of the singers’ souls, which she could
actually hear, the purity that lifted their songs like a flight
of doves above her music-drunken head. If they committed
murder—and to her even revolutionary murder was
murder—what would the music be like? (emphasis original
14-15)
Meridian identifies with much larger black communities beyond her revolutionary group.
She values not just the rural communities’ churches but also the farmlands of her
childhood her urban revolutionary friends have no knowledge of. These friends have seen
rural black communities during their civil rights work but, unlike Meridian, have not
lived in them. She views her potential actions, and those of her companions, that would
involve murder as corrupting the purity she sees embodied by rural black communities.
Meridian’s view of rural black communities as pure, innocent, and in need of
protection from persecution is her motherly response to these communities. Unable to
proclaim that she would kill for the revolution, Meridian decides to “‘go back to the
people, live among them, like Civil Rights workers used to do’” (18). For Meridian, the
people and the things she is fighting for are rooted in the South, not in the North. She
intentionally seeks out the small towns because that is where she senses they need her
more at the moment. By the end of the novel, it is revealed that Meridian is more
committed to the revolution than those who claimed they would kill for it. Her return to
the South is not a return to her home community. Instead, Meridian survives by
moving from one small town to another, finding jobs—
some better or worse than others—to support herself;
remaining close to the people—to see them, to be with
them, to understand them and herself, the people who now
fed her and tolerated her and also, in a fashion, cared about
her. (18-19)
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The numerous small rural towns in the South are spread across Georgia, Mississippi,
Alabama, and Louisiana.
Meridian’s presence and work in the small rural communities are integral to, or
can be better read as her, quest for her identity. As Deborah McDowell rightly notes,
the continued progress of her search for identity requires
that she go backward in order to move forward, and
backward is the South […] Walker sees the South, despite
its history of racism and oppression, as regenerative, for it
is the South that is the cradle of the black man’s experience
in the New World, and the South that has continued to
shape his experience in this country. (174)
Deeply connected to the South, Meridian is unable to successfully find a place and
permanence in the North with her militant companions. This rootedness also keeps her
fighting for what the members of the black southern communities believe. Much like
Andrews’s Lea, Meridian becomes most powerful when she positions herself as outsider
in relation to the communities in which she lives. Meridian finds her strength in
protecting the communities, as in when she defiantly stands in front of a tank. However,
instead of externalizing her experiences and feelings as Lea does, Meridian internalizes
them with an adverse physiological impact on her body. Her ability to self-define occurs,
however, when she chooses to attend church services and finds herself at a large Baptist
church. Although she goes there with the intent to remain an outsider, she discovers to
her surprise a community no longer in need of a messianic mother to care for it. Pulled
into the community by this healing epiphany, Meridian is finally able to answer the
difficult questions of community, liberation, and self.
Although critics agree that Meridian’s healing in enacted by the church scene
towards the end of the novel, they give varied reasons for the resolution. Some reviewers
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argued that the church service allows her to envision for herself a future that can
accommodate her nonviolent approach,35 others argue that it helps her realize the real
question is not whether or not she can kill, but whether she can live through it all.36
Scholars have also argued that it is her rediscovery of black cultural heritage in the
church that allows her to rediscover her identity.37 All of these are adequate reasons that
accurately reflect her experience in the church and afterwards. The connection among all
of these discoveries Meridian makes during her time in the church, however, is that she
has finally found the revolutionary community she had been looking for since she left her
hometown for Atlanta over a decade earlier.
It is significant that it is the same group Meridian initially views as needing her
self-sacrificing protection that illustrates the success of the Civil Rights Movement when
it absorbs the Movement into the church and persistently maintains the Movement’s
relevance to their lives. It is equally noteworthy that Meridian misses the moment this
change occurs because she has remained an outsider to all of these communities. She has
been living off of the angelic image of the young girls singing the same songs in the
choir. To Meridian’s shock, the static image of the church from her childhood has
changed with its members’ needs. Upon looking up to admire the stain glass, Meridian
finds a “broad-shouldered black man…wearing a brilliant blue suit” in place of Jesus’s
image (203). Meridian enters the church after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,
whose image is possibly the one in the stained glass. Meridian has spent the majority of
the novel functioning as a martyr for the Movement, but she realizes that she does not
35
See Roberta M. Hendrickson’s “Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights
Movement”
36
See Susan Danielson’s “Alice Walker’s Meridian, feminism, and the Movement.”
37
See Deborah McDowell’s “The Self in Bloom: Walker’s Meridian” and Seongho Yoon’s “Gendering the
Movement: Black Womanhood, SNCC, and Post-Civil Rights Anxieties in Alice Walker’s Meridian.”
79
need to fill that role38. Plenty of people had already lost their lives, like the young man
whose funeral was taking place at the church. This new impression of Jesus is the first of
the many changes Meridian notices. Meridian enters the church for a reminder of what
she is protecting, but experiences confusion and questions instead:
And what was Meridian, who had always thought of the
black church as mainly a reactionary power, to make of
this? What was anyone? She was puzzled that the music
had changed. Puzzled that everyone in the congregation
had anticipated the play. Puzzled that young people in
church nowadays did not fall asleep. Perhaps it was, after
all, the only place left for black people to congregate,
where the problems of life were not discussed fraudulently
and the approach to the future was considered communally,
and moral questions were taken seriously. (203)
Meridian pieces together, within the church, the puzzle that the living revolution
of a community does not need her protection. Her shock in this moment is due to her
finding the kind of revolutionary community she always wanted to belong to since she
left her own rural hometown. The difference between the church congregation and her
old revolutionary group is not merely the solmnness with which the congregation takes
the issues but that the decisions are being made locally as a community, rather than for
the community. The transformations in the institutionalized church and on the respective
members of the church congregation signal a significant change in the future outlook for
the black rural southern community. The seriousness with which the moral questions are
taken—such as the subject of seditious murdering that Meridian is unable to answer for
her revolutionary friends—finally gives Meridian the room to responsibly answer that
query for herself. Meridian realizes during this moment in the church that actually she is
38
See Paul Tewkesbury’s “Keeping the Dream Alive: Meridian as Alice Walker’s Homage to Martin
Luther King and the Beloved Community” (2011) for an analysis of Meridian as a Christ-figure.
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not alone in her continuing struggle for civil rights. These southern communities, unlike
her northern revolutionary friends, have not given up on the Movement.
We should point out that the Movement within the rural black community is
strategically much different than that in which Meridian was trained. Meridian recognizes
the different approach being taken by the church as she listens to the unexpected message
of the sermons: “‘Understand this,’ they were saying, ‘the church’ […] ‘the music, the
form of worship that has always sustained us, the kind of ritual you share with us, these
are the ways to transformation that we know. We want to take this with us as far as we
can’” (204). Like Meridian’s own form of resistance that puts her outside the formal
Movement, the new sermons she hears in the church discuss bringing about change on
the community’s own terms. The sermons ask the community to participate in the
revolution using their own cultural knowledge and tactics, not by using those dictated by
outsiders. This is a response to the desires of the Civil Rights Movement workers who
sought transformations from the community members that they did not know. Meridian
finally recognizes the importance that these overhauls are culturally and spatially tied.
Walker suggests that Meridian’s return to the South is the correct course of action, even
though at the time it is in response to her feeling lost and out of place amongst her
revolutionary friends.
The seemingly innocent and vulnerable communities of the South she sought to
protect show her that they are willing and able to care for themselves. As she listens to
the congregations’ side of the service, “She was suddenly aware that the sound of the ‘ahmens’ was different. Not muttered in resignation, not shouted in despair. No one bounced
in his seat. No one even perspired. Just the ‘ah-mens’ rose clearly, unsentimentally, and
81
with the firm tone of ‘We are fed up’” (200). There is now a calm, somber tone to the
church services that Meridian has not experienced before. The congregation is very much
engaged in the events happening around them. And, very significantly, Meridian sees that
Truman is wrong; the communities have not been appeased as Truman claims others
have. Meridian senses she has successfully fulfilled her self-arrogated role as protective
mother to the communities and it is time for her to step aside and watch them take action
themselves.
Attending the church service, Meridian sees those around her as still keeping alive
the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement. As mentioned earlier, she is not standing alone
for the rights of her people. She also ultimately knows and accepts her limits and that she
could kill for her cause. Moving beyond the constraints of the formal Civil Rights
Movement affords Meridian a new outlook on life. During her experience in the church,
“there was in Meridian’s chest a breaking as if a tight string binding her lungs had given
way, allowing her to breathe freely. For she understood, finally, that the respect she owed
her life was to continue, against whatever obstacles, to live it, and not to give up any
particle of it without a fight to the death, preferably not her own” (204). She does
acknowledge that though there are things worth killing for, she may not after all be the
right person to do it. In taking back her body and life, Meridian finds a communal civil
rights struggle in which she can more appropriately define her role as supporter and not
extremist. To her the power of the local community movement lies in the ability for all
involved to choose their own strategies based on their own situations, and to ensure, more
importantly, that the range of tactics will be supported by the community.
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Meridian’s physical recovery is therefore based on her finding a black community
that shares her concerns and has the institutional and ideological space for individual
differences. Walker suggests that the success of the Civil Rights Movement is visible in
the actions developing within communities at the local level. Meridian’s body, as mother,
is reclaimed through the community’s capacity to define its own actions and protect itself
without Meridian’s sacrificial intervention. Meridian finally transitions from her role as
protective mother to supportive mother, a role she desired but could not realize from her
own mother. Meridian has taken her mother’s sacrificial form of mothering and moved
beyond it to discover her own identity and approach, one in which she can support the
community’s goals and actions without compromising her self.
***
As Andrews and Walker illustrate in the forgoing discussion, the Civil Rights
Movement in the South as a theme in African American literature of the post-Civil Rights
era has enabled authors to address the importance of both place and the individual, as
well as questions of local and localized change in southern social structures. Although
both authors position specific moments as turning points in relation to the goals of the
Civil Rights Movement, neither acknowledges a conclusive end to the struggles the
Movement addresses. Instead, both novelists suggest that the return to the South and the
desire to participate in the remaking of the space of the South cannot overlook the need
for an awareness of remaining social issues in the region. At the end of Baby Sweet’s the
brothel is tellingly and potentially still operational and exploiting the black women’s
bodies inside, and in Meridian the church community Meridian is now a part of is left to
respond to the new injustices facing its congregation. The culmination of the Civil Rights
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Movement in these texts positions the South as habitable for black women—and,
possibly for black men pending Truman’s revelation begun at the end of Meridian. As the
narratives clearly indicate, there is a lot more work to be done in order to fully reclaim
and transform the space. That is the unfinished project for the return migrants and their
communities.
Andrews and Walker intertwine the reclamation and transformation of the black
individual’s self with the reclamation and transformation of the South. The return from
the North to the South, both physically for the characters and imaginatively for the
writers, requires reconciliation with the spaces of the North and the South. While
characters conciliate attitudes and experiences associated with each space, the writers too
must balance those spatial complexities and meanings, as Andrews and Walker have
done in Baby Sweet’s and Meridian. In the next chapter and in the return migration
novels Praisesong for the Widow and Leaving Atlanta, Paule Marshall and Tayari Jones
respectively attempt to reconcile the North and the South.
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CHAPTER II. URBAN NORTHS AND RURAL SOUTHS IN PAULE MARSHALL’S
PRAISESONG FOR THE WIDOW AND TAYARI JONES’S LEAVING ATLANTA
Following the Civil Rights Movement the South becomes a space that can be
reconfigured in African American literature, enabling black writers to complicate notions
of the urban North and the rural South. Many black writers, such as Tayari Jones and
Paule Marshall, challenge the geographic boundaries of the North and the South as they
reclaim the space of the South and rethink its importance for African Americans. This
shift has been accounted for in several ways: some scholars impute it to the South being a
place, a space, in which African Americans have already invested so much and now
return to reclaim;39 others attribute the thematic shifts to the rise of postmodernism in
African American literature that coincided with the end of the Civil Rights Movement;40
and still others see the South as the sight of the modern41 which makes it important for
African Americans’ future advancements. The idea of the South as a place of possibility
in discussions of modern developments and the future, and as evidenced in black return
migration to that space, has been difficult for some scholars to fully rationalize.42
However, the treatment of the urban and the rural in black return migration novels of the
post-Civil Rights era reflects black characters’ complicated relationships with both the
39
See Farah Jasmin Griffin’s “Who Set You Flowin’?”The African American Migration Narrative (1995).
See Madhu Dubey’s Signs and Cities: Black Literary Post-Modernism (2003).
41
See Toni Morrison’s interview with Carolyn Denard “Blacks, Modernism, and the American South: An
Interview with Toni Morrison.” and Jürgen Grandt’s Shaping Words to Fit the Soul: The Southern Ritual
Grounds of Afro-Modenrism (2009).
42
This is evidenced by sociologists’ initial responses to reports of a black return migration to the South, as
cited in the introduction.
40
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North and the South in a way that questions lingering beliefs and assumptions about both
spaces.
These complex relationships with the North and the South have drawn scholars’
attention to black writers’ ambiguity towards place. This ambivalence speaks to those
expected attitudes towards specific space mentioned in the introduction. In the American
socio-cultural imagination “the North” generally connotes “the urban” and “the South”
has been equated with “the rural.” This stereotypically further develops into ideas
associated with those terms: the urban as progressive and metropolitan, and the rural as
backwards and rustic43. Toni Morrison acknowledges the ambivalence her migrant
characters feel about the urban North and the rural South, based on watching her own
parents’ struggles with the North and the South. In a 1998 interview, “Blacks,
Modernism, and the American South,” Morrison admits, “You give up a lot, you know,
to take advantage or benefits of urban or working life elsewhere: The problem is trying to
balance those two environments” (qtd. in Denard 3). The desire and attempt to
complicate, if not balance, these two environments has been a feature of African
American literature across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and before. The
ambiguity relative to the North and the South—between the urban and the rural—can be
read as an attempt to deal with the complexities of spaces that are culturally supposed to
be desired or rejected. The urban North has symbolized freedom and opportunity while
causing fractured identity and feelings of physical and spiritual isolation; likewise, the
rural South has corresponded with violence and danger while providing a nurturing home
43
For the historical development, from the Puritans through WWII, of attitudes about the urban and its
relationship to the rural in the United States see Sidney H. Bremer’s Urban Intersections: Meetings of Life
and Literature in United States Cities (1992). Also see the collection Literature & the Urban Experience:
Essays on the City and Literature (1981).
86
and community.44 These conflations are problematic for African American place based
identities, especially as characters attempt to access the sustentative features of each
space and as these spaces encounter one another.
This urban North-rural South dichotomy can be seen in both northbound and
southbound African American migration narratives in the form of the absence of the
southern city and the focus on the northern city in the stories. Yoshinobu Hakutani and
Robert Butler position African American literature in opposition to classical American
literature based on its treatment of the urban and the rural. In their collection of essays
The City in African American Literature (1995), they persuasively advance the thesis that
“the main tradition of African American literature has been persistently pro-urban in
vision” (9). They attribute this pro-urban vision, which they date as far back as Fredrick
Douglass, to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow that constructs dangerous images of
rural areas and the South. Hakutani and Butler acknowledge, however, that scholarship
has centered less on the city in African American literature, and more on the rural and
black folk life, despite the overwhelming presence of the city in the literature. To Hazel
Carby, the fascination with the rural can be traced to the recovery of Zora Neale Hurston
“which represents the rural folk as bearers of Afro-American history and preservers of
Afro-American culture” (175). Carby’s study Reconstructing Womanhood: The
Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987) looks at the texts of other
Harlem Renaissance women writers that she claims open up a space for “the fictional
44
James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and James Baldwin’s Go Tell it
on the Mountain (1953) represent the urban North as the safe space for their main characters with an
understanding of the loss of family and culture in the rural South. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 1952) show the destructiveness of that supposedly safe urban North.
Raymond Andrews’s Muskhogean County Trilogy (1978-1983) represents the violent but nurturing rural
South with his characters choosing it over the urban North with its thinly veiled racism.
87
urban confrontation of race, class, and sexuality” (175) that follows them. Like Hakutani
and Butler, she argues that texts by black women writers that prioritize the black urban
working class are being marginalized in scholarship by those focusing on the black rural
experience.
The absence or de-emphasis of the southern city in northbound migration
narratives removes a crucial piece of migration routes from the fictional narratives. The
southern city historically functioned as a short-term or long-term transition space in the
migration from the rural South to the North, West, and Midwest (Wilkerson 261-262).
The northern city serves a specific purpose in both the northbound Great Migration
narratives and the southbound return migration narratives. The northern city is used to
juxtapose the North and the South by representing the urban in contrast to the rural, as in
James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) or James
Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953). In the northbound great migration
narratives the northern city is imagined in various ways at different points in time, from a
space of possibility, as in the first half of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) or
Morrison’s Jazz, to a space of hostility, as in the second half of Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Southbound return migration novels respond to these versions of the northern city to
show the North is not necessarily the answer, not that it fails, but that it is unable to
provide necessary physical and spiritual connections and nourishments. Whereas
northbound migration narratives frequently end with characters remaining in the North
despite its various limitations, southbound return migration novels of the post-Civil
Rights era, particularly those under study, depict the characters choosing to make a home
88
in the South. Despite the importance of the city in northbound great migration narratives,
the southern city only exists on the periphery of most northbound migration narratives. 45
Contemporary African American return migration novels feature both the urban
North and the rural South, though the most prominent space is understandably the rural
South because that is the focal point of the return migrations. The privileging of the rural
South in black southern experience in return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era
de-emphasizes the southern city largely due to those essentializing conflations of the
North with the urban and the South with the rural. Thus, the southern city is frequently
absent in return migration narratives in which it more commonly serves as a spatial
marker for locating the smaller towns and rural areas surrounding them. For example, in
the texts discussed in the previous chapter, Atlanta juxtaposes Andrews’s fictional county
of Muskhogean without functioning as a significant setting for the rest of the narrative; in
Meridian, on the other hand, Atlanta is the city that houses the university Meridian
attends for a significant portion of the novel, but Meridian is also pulled away from the
city by the university’s desire to distance itself from the social activism occurring outside
its gates. In both cases, the return migration is to the rural towns.
This chapter addresses the ways in which contemporary African American
literature challenges the conflation of the South with the rural and the North with the
urban in the American socio-cultural imagination. I focus on Paule Marshall’s Praisesong
for the Widow (1983) and Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta (2002). I will examine their
characters’ place-based identity struggles as the characters attempt to reconcile their
relationship with the urban North and the rural South. Marshall and Jones are among the
45
For instance, Washington D.C. is briefly mentioned in Ellison’s Invisible Man during the main
character’s train trip to New York, and Atlanta is referred to as the site of Helga Crane’s fiancé’s parents’
home while she is working at the southern school, yet neither character spends time in these cities.
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post-Civil Rights era black writers who interrogate the role of the urban North and the
rural South in relation to place-based identities through their characters’ endeavors to
align the urban and the rural. I start with Marshall. Her highly symbolic text directly
engages with the urban North-rural South dichotomy but, as I content, ultimately refuses
to privilege one space over the other. Both Marshall and Jones depict, among other
things, the way attempts to repress and remove the South from the characters’ cultural
and spiritual knowledge results in fractured identity, personal vulnerability, and stressed
familial relationships. Withholding historical and cultural knowledge of the South is
damaging to both the older individuals with the knowledge as well as the younger
generations deprived of it. Marshall is unique in that she elevates both spaces as viable
homes. She shows that in order to make the North the fulfilling place it is supposed to be,
one must maintain open and diligent connections to the South. Jones’s treatment of the
North and South is also quite distinct because she interrogates assumptions about both the
urban and rural within the space of the South. Jones complicates the geographical
boundaries of the North and the South by picturing Atlanta as a liminal space that is
simultaneously North and South. Marshall and Jones’s texts exemplify feelings of
ambivalence towards the North and the South, towards the urban and the rural, and
towards community and individual place-based identities.
Praisesong for the Widow recounts the life of Avey Johnson who experiences a
constant pull between the North and the South. Avey is a second generation migrant to
the North; Avey’s North is New York: Harlem, Brooklyn, and the North White Plains
suburb. The narrative begins with a middle-aged, retired, widowed, and over packed
Avey vacationing on the cruise ship, the Bianca Pride, in the Caribbean. It is here that her
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past resurfaces in her dreams with her Great-Aunt Cuney beckoning for her return. Her
dreams force her to confront elements of her self that she has spent decades rejecting. She
abandons the rest of the cruise and her northern middle-class friends at the Grenada port
with the intent of flying back to New York, but instead finds herself reassessing the
decisions in her life with the help of local Lebert Joseph. She rediscovers her past and
cultural history by experiencing her connection to the African diaspora through the
annual cultural pilgrimage of local out-islanders from Grenada to Carricaou Island.
Many reviewers have focused on Praisesong’s celebration of the diaspora in the
rural and the healing ritual on Carriacou Island;46 however, the South is not entirely
affirmed, nor is the North entirely condemned. This scholarship on Praisesong uses the
term south to delineate the physical direction of Avey’s movement from New York to the
Caribbean-as-south and in reference to the United States South. As Marshall states,
“when I say African American, I’m talking about blacks from Brazil to Brooklyn”
(Conversations 79). She expands the meaning of the term African American to include all
of the African diaspora in North and South America. Throughout her novels, her focus
consistently returns to the African diaspora. She seeks to illuminate the similarities that
exist rather than the differences. Scholars’ globalizing treatment of the South in the novel
diminishes the significance of the United States’ South. Differentiating between the
South of the United States and the global South of the Caribbean, however, does not
negate the importance of the events that occur on Carriacou Island. Instead, Marshall’s
46
See, for instance, Barbara Christian’s “Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall’s
Praisesong for the Widow”, Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego’s The Search for Wholeness and Diasporic
Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature, Barbara Frey Waxman’s “The Widow’s Journey to
Self and Roots: Aging and Society in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow”, and Carol Boyce
Davies’s “Black Women’s Journey into Self: A Womanist Reading of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the
Widow.”
91
simple representations of the United States’ North and South, paralleled in her portrayal
of Grenada and Carriacou Island, complexly interrogate the individual’s choices and
actions that disrupt the spaces.
Avey’s decision in the end to split her time between the North and the South,
instead of selecting one over the other, shows the prospects of embracing and intersecting
both spaces. Marshall does not recoil from urban reality; rather she depicts its
possibilities for African Americans as a place of financial security and opportunities and
its short comings when those who inhabit it get caught up in the quest for materialism
and, as a result, lose knowledge of their selves. This alienation could happen in both
urban and rural environments because it is associated with the character’s actions. The
urban heightens the chances of that disconnection from self, however, in that it creates
more distractions that lead to physical and spiritual distancing from cultural pasts.
By reinforcing these spatial tropes while rejecting their totalizing nature, Marshall
unsettles the view that stereotypes the urban North as a destructive space to be escaped
and the rural South as a healing space to which to return. Marshall shows the ways in
which the rural, as place and sensibility, can be constructed and exist within the urban
North and, conversely, how the urban North and the rural South can be complementary in
the maintenance of the self. As Marshall demonstrates, the spaces functioning together
depend, however, on each person’s ability and willingness to negotiate between the two
spaces. The decision from Avey’s past that looms over her the entire novel is her
rejection of her southern place-based identity and subsequent distancing of the South.
Although Avey is born and raised in the North, she develops a southern place-based
identity through connections to her father’s relatives. Avey’s father maintains ties with
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his southern family after moving to the North, which results in Avey spending the
summers of her childhood in Tatem, South Carolina with her Great-Great Aunt Cuney. It
is in the South that Avey is ingrained with Aunt Cuney’s spirituality and rituals, which
involve repeated physical pilgrimages to the site of Ibo Landing and the passing of
cultural knowledge about the rebellious Igbo slaves of Ibo Landing with the myth of the
flying Africans. Despite Avey’s inability to fully believe or understand the importance of
Aunt Cuney’s teachings, she forms a connection with the rural South and Ibo Landing
that, subsequently, supports her life in the urban North.
Avey’s childhood influences remain critical in stabilizing her psyche and
reestablishing her sense of self and kinship, even as a young married woman. Avey’s
affinity for the rural South throughout her childhood couches the rural as necessary
mental, emotional, cultural, and physical stimulations, even though Avey is unable to
recognize the types of nourishment it offers her. She and her husband, Jay, actively and
symbolically incorporate aspects of the rural in the urban space of their apartment, as the
narrator says:
Back then the young woman whose headstrong ways and
high feelings Avey Johnson had long put behind her, whom
she found an embarrassment to even think of now with her
1940s upsweeps and pompadours and vampish high-heeled
shoes, used to kick off her shoes the moment she came in
from work, shed her stockings and start the dusting and
picking up in her bare feet [...] Freed of the high-heels her
body always felt restored to its proper axis. And the
hardwood floor which Jay had rescued from layers of
oxblood-colored paint when they first moved in and stained
earth brown, the floor reverberating with ‘Cottontail’ and
‘Lester Leaps In’ would be like a rich nurturing ground
from which she had sprung and to which she could always
turn for sustenance. (11-12)
93
In this memory of their apartment on Halsey Street we discern the emblematic
grafting of elements of the rural onto the urban space through the wood floors and earth
brown stain. Similar to Avey freeing herself of high-heeled shoes, Jay’s rescuing of the
wood from layers of paint is a figural stripping away of the artificial trappings of urban
life. Additionally, his staining the floor “earth brown” represents his attempt to ground
their fifth floor walkup to the earth. After coming in off the paved city streets and also
shedding her artificial trappings, Avey’s reconnection to the earth and black culture
through the music allows her to recover spiritually and physically from her state job as a
clerk. Avey’s embarrassment with this recollection initially appears to be about her hair
and “vampish high-heeled shoes,” but it is actually in relation to her desire to be
connected to the earth. Here Avey acknowledges that it is her “bare feet” on the “earth
brown,” “hardwood floor” that rejuvenate her self every evening. The point is not just
that Jay recreates nature inside their home for Avey and that Avey removes the artificial
barriers between it and her body; it is also that this connection to the earth provides her
with the sustenance she needs. This tropologic idealization of the rural helps reinforce the
idea that healing and nurturance mostly occur in the rural space, not the urban space. And
more important, it counters the reductive presumption that the rural, no matter how
artificially constructed, cannot exist in the urban North. Marshall wants us to not forget,
however, that the presence of the rural in the urban North, and vise versa, must be
consciously and continuously sought out or it and its effects will be lost.
Thirty-five years pass between the Avey that sought sustenance from a hardwood
floor and the Avey with a six piece luggage set aboard the cruise ship. Over the decades
Avey has ignored and rejected her southern place-based identity, with no more trips to
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Tatem and Ibo Landing, and a rather revealing silencing of Duke Ellington and Count
Basie Kansas City Seven’s music. For Avey and Jay, who shaves off his mustache, the
rejection of black culture becomes synonymous with a better life, since the better life
they are after is the American Dream of white, middle-class suburbia. Jay’s success as an
accountant secures them their piece of the American Dream with their home in the North
White Plains suburb. Their northern place-based identities are defined by obtaining
financial security and material possessions in order to perform the appropriate class status
to separate them from the black urban poor who haunt Avey during her time in the
apartment on Halsey St.
Once Jay and Avey achieve their desired financial security, they have become too
far removed from their cultural investments and stronghold that they are unable to
recover their southern place-based identities. Their lengthy and complete commitment to
this inauthentic performance does not leave room for their former selves. Avey’s loss of
self is so deeply rooted in her subconscious that even in her dreams she becomes crippled
by her desire to perform her class and material position in life that she is unable to follow
Aunt Cuney to Ibo Landing:
Did she really expect her to go walking over to the Landing
dressed as she was? […] That obstacle course of scrub,
rock and rough grass leading down from the cotton field
would make quick work of her stockings, and the open-toed
patent leather pumps she was wearing for the first time
would never survive that mud flat which had once been a
rice field. Glancing down, she saw they were already
filmed with dust just from her standing there. Her
amusement began to give way to irritation. (40-41)
Like her earlier recollection, Avey’s understanding of self is depicted through her
connection to and disconnection from the material and the natural. Where previously she
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kicked off her shoes to feel her axis restored through her bare feet’s contact with Jay’s
symbolic construction of the rural in their apartment, here, in her dream, she refuses to
follow Aunt Cuney out into the rural in order to protect her stockings and “open-toed
patent leather pumps.” Her understanding of these items’ utility is correct—the urban
items would not survive the rural trek to Ibo Landing—but her inability to remove them,
as she once did, or to follow Aunt Cuney, rather than scoff at the idea, shows her failure
to understand what that space had once offered her. Her further irritation at the film of
dust on her shoes and stockings is indicative of her rejection of the rural encountering the
urban. She is particularly exasperated with this urban-rural encounter because at this
point she does not know how to reconcile the two spaces and everything they encompass
despite her understanding that both have significantly contributed to her life.
Making room for both the North and the South in her life as a child was feasible
for Avey. As a child, she spent her time in Tatem traipsing around the countryside,
learning about alternative medicine, and visiting Ibo Landing. These trips eventually
shorten in duration as she grows up and gets married, but she and her husband, Jay, make
it a point early in their marriage to go to South Carolina every year in order to reconnect
with their cultural heritage. The Igbo are not necessarily Avey’s family’s specific roots,
but they are claimed as such by Aunt Cuney when she leaves the Protestant church. This
is an important aspect of the Ibo Landing as a piece of black cultural heritage, that it is
available to those who want to claim it. Aunt Cuney’s inability to keep her feet on the
ground and her temporary banishment from the church results in a rejection of the
southern community of which she is a member and allows her to develop her own
spiritual practice. She shares this practice with her great-niece, but the connection with
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Ibo Landing is an individual experience that Avey struggles to understand herself. The
story Aunt Cuney tells Avey every time they visit Ibo Landing is the passing of both
cultural and familial knowledge. The context of the story places Avey’s great-great-great
grandmother, and namesake, as witness to the event. While working as a slave, her
grandmother witnesses a large group of Igbo brought to shore from a slave ship. She
watches as they envision their future in the United States, and then turn around and
walk/fly across the Atlantic back to Africa. In addition to her grandmother as witness, the
familial knowledge accompanying this tale is that her grandmother “just picked herself
up and took off after ‘em. In her mind. Her body she always usta say might be in Tatum
but her mind, her mind was long gone with the Ibos…” (39).
This fragmentation of mind and body provides the grandmother with spiritual
protection, through the removal of her mind, from her experience during slavery. Barbara
Christian identifies a “recurrent motif throughout the novel, that the body might be in one
place and the mind in another, is characterized not as fragmentation but as a source of
wisdom, stemming from a history of the forced displacement of blacks in the West” (75).
The separation of mind and body as indicative of wisdom is valid for the experience of
Avey’s great-great-great grandmother and later Aunt Cuney, but it does not hold through
the generations. Upon Avey’s telling of the history of Ibo Landing during Jay’s first trip
to Tatem, Jay responds, “‘I’m with your aunt Cuney and the old woman you were named
for. I believe it, Avey. Every word’” (115). Avey spends years questioning the story and
unable to understand its significance, but Jay immediately connects with the cultural
history of the South. Even though Jay is from the Midwest, Kansas, he recognizes his
own connection to the South and the legend of the brave Igbo who chose to walk back to
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Africa rather than be enslaved. Much like his reverence for the blues and jazz, and for
African American poetry which he recites, Jay sees Ibo Landing as a rich piece of his
culture that revitalizes his spirit and that is kept from them in the North. Through his
connection with Ibo Landing, Jay develops his southern place-based identity with a piece
of his cultural heritage which is dependent on physical connection to a specific place. Jay
understands the Igbo in a different way than Avey, but this appreciation ultimately does
not help him survive the demands of their life in the North.
The body-mind split that functions as a source of wisdom for Avey’s great-greatgreat grandmother results in the destruction of Jay and of his and Avey’s marriage. Avey
does not understand the importance of her connection to the rural and after discovering
she is pregnant with her third child Marion, she severs her link to the rural and the South
with her consuming quest for the American Dream. Avey’s American Dream is a
suburban house in the right neighborhood, slightly outside the city, which requires Jay to
establish a new career that would allow them to achieve the necessary financial means for
her desire. In a scene similar to Aunt Cuney’s rejection from the church, Avey falsely
accuses Jay of cheating. This act results in a transformation that is the opposite of Aunt
Cuney’s. Unable to argue with her any longer, Jay gives in and gives up his self:
While she had stood in the arms of the tearful man who had
stepped forward, Jay might have slipped quietly out of the
room, down five flights of stairs and up Halsey Street out
of their lives, leaving Jerome Johnson to do what he
perhaps felt he had neither the strength nor the heart for…
(136)
This scene reflects the grandmother’s statement that her body was in Tatem, but “her
mind was long gone with the Ibo” (39). For Jay, he leaves his body in New York to
complete the necessary tasks to gain material success, while his mind takes his culture
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and leaves him. This rupture does not save Jay as it does Aunt Cuney or Avey’s greatgreat-great grandmother; instead, it marks an end of his relationship with Avey and an
end of their ties to their history. Their southern identities are consequently muted in their
lives and their northern identities are prioritized. Avey and Jay’s bodies are in one place
and their minds in another. Marshall suggests that they both close off a section of
themselves because they are unable to maintain the various dimensions of their placebased identities while building a different life.
Avey and Jay achieve financial success and enjoy considerable material comfort;
this, however, results in the destruction of her and Jay’s selves when they forfeit their
racially and culturally protective rituals. Their alienation from the South and from
African American culture and history make them strangers to each other. Avey recalls,
“On occasion, glancing up at him, she would surprise what almost looked like the vague,
pale outline of another face superimposed on his, as in a double exposure” (131). Avey’s
doctor interprets this strange phenomenon of her inability to recognize her own reflection
in the mirror as “a sure sign […] of money in the bank” (49). The doctor’s suggestion is
as equally disturbing to Avey as the superimposed faces she sees on herself and her
husband. It is not until after Jay’s death when Avey goes to the Caribbean that she is able
to rediscover her self. Although this rediscovery and her spiritual healing are too late to
help Jay, she is still driven by her desire to understand why they trade one another and
their cultural identity for monetary success.
Avey’s realization of the importance of her return to the South and her return to
her heritage is tied to the Carriacou Excursion. This section of the narrative has attracted
the most critical attention because Marshall deftly shows Avey rediscovering and re-
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embracing her alienated self and her African roots. Her inner struggles become solidified
and externalized by her encounter with Grenada local, Lebert Joseph, who picks up what
Aunt Cuney’s spirit started on cruise ship by inviting Avey to attend the annual return to
his home island. Critics have read Lebert as the Papa Legba figure47 who meets Avey at a
time of conflict and confusion in her life. As the god of the crossroads and a trickster
figure, Lebert tricks Avey into partaking in the Carriacou Excursion while functioning as
her spiritual guide and ancestral figure. It is Avey’s decision to attend the Carriacou
Excursion—which involves her own experience with a reverse Middle Passage on the
boat ride from the mainland to the islands, a ritual cleansing in the forms of purging the
middle-class excesses from her system and of a bath and redressing, her witnessing the
cultural heritage of the out-islanders from their performance of African dances, and her
own eventual participation in the dancing—that revitalizes her body and mind, preparing
her for the work ahead once she returns to the United States. The dancing has been
particularly interesting to scholars48 who have noted that the moment Avey participates in
the dancing ritual on Carriacou Island is the moment her mind and body reunite as she
experiences embodied knowledge. This intricate process of her guided recuperation of
self ends with renaming as she recovers her ancestral name Avatara and assumes the role
of ancestor for herself.
The Carriacou Excursion functions as a form of rebirth for Avey as she
participates in the excursion to the out-islanders’ home and sees how they reconnect with
47
See, for example, Mawuena Logan “Spirit and Body: African Spirituality in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong
for the Widow” for an extended discussion of the parallels between Lebert Joseph and Papa Legba.
48
See Barbara Frey Waxman’s “Dancing Out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall,
Shange, and Walker”, Paulette Brown-Hinds’s “In the Spirit: Dance as Healing Ritual in Paule Marshall’s
Praisesong for the Widow”, and Courtney Thorsson’s Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary
African American Novels.
100
their African roots through this annual return. Although Avey rejects Aunt Cuney in her
dreams because she, Avey, has taken that journey to Ibo Landing countless times and
remains unable to fully understand its place in her life, Joseph Lebert’s bringing her to
Carriacou positions her as an outsider with less at stake watching others reconnect with
their heritage than if she had to do so herself. Although he guides her to the island, once
she is there he turns her over to his daughter Rosalie Parvay who privately conducts the
bathing ritual (216-220). Rosalie and her maid Milda accompany Avey to the island’s
cultural celebration, which does not distinguish between the women’s class statuses.
What Avey does not realize until she is on Carriacou Island witnessing the annual rituals
is that the out-islanders’ experiences are similar to hers and Jay’s.
The out-islanders are able to do what she and Jay cannot. They have reconciled
the ontologic and epistemologic aspects of the urban and the rural in their lives while
keeping intact the necessary aspects of each space. The Grenada coast is described as
lined with hotels to support its tourist industry, while Avey describes Carriacou Island, as
she leaves it aboard a plane, as having a landscape in which buildings are sparse and
barely visible. Comparably Carriacou Island translates as the rural and Grenada as the
urban for the out-islanders, just as Ibo Landing in South Carolina functions as the rural
and Harlem, Brooklyn, and White Plains as the urban for Avey. As Silvia Pilar CastroBorrego claims in “Praisesong for the Widow as Narrative Restoration: Reading Black
Women’s Search for Spiritual Wholeness” (2011), “cultural knowledge must be retrieved
and negotiated between the demands of material well-being and the persue [sic] of
spiritual wholeness” (194). Avey’s participation is important, but the key aspect of her
involvement in the Carriacou Excursion is the model of bringing together two disparate
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lives in order to achieve a necessary balance between cultural roots and financial security.
The out-islanders offer Avey a model for reconciling the urban and the rural in her own
life.
The model for reconciling the urban and the rural observed by Avey reflects and
revises her own experiences of the urban and the rural. Like Avey and Jay, the Carriacou
islanders are hardworking people who migrate to Grenada for the opportunity to better
their material conditions. Avey’s cab driver tells her the out-islanders are different from
the other Grenadians because they are
Serious people. Hardworking. They come to live here and
before you know it they’re doing better than those like
myself that’s born in the place. Is a fact. In no time they’re
pulling down a good job, building themself a house—
nothing big and outlandish: they don’ go in for a lot of
show; buying themself a car—again is always a sensible
car; you never see them over doing things; starting up a
business. They has a business mind, you know, same as
white people. And they looks out for one another just like
white people. (78)
Out-islanders’ goals are similar to Avey and Jay’s, who want to make a better life for
themselves and to keep their family out of the poverty lurking below their apartment on
Halsey Street49. The cab driver both attributes and condemns the success of the outislanders to what he sees as them behaving like white people. The cab driver also tells
Avey that he refused to attend the Carriacou Excursion when he was dating an outislander. He views their desire to return to a rural island as nonsensical. What the cab
driver misses in that refusal and in his dismissing the out-islanders behavior as “like
white people” is that their annual returns foster a tight-knit community encouraging them
49
Barbara Christian notes that the activities on the street below Jay and Avey’s apartment serve as an ever
present reminder that those who are just getting by can at any point be turned out onto the street (78).
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to look out for one another50. This community is not exclusive nor excluding, as shown in
the invitations that they extend to outsiders, such as the cab driver and Avey. The outislanders’ success, much like Avey and Jay’s, is based on their hard work and financial
restraint. A key difference between them and the out-islanders, however, is that the outislanders are conquering their version of the urban space as a self-affirming community,
and they maintain connections to the rural space that holds their culture. Avey’s partaking
in the Carriacou ritual allows her to see the advantages of keeping both spaces active in
her life.
The out-islanders, additionally, go beyond functioning in the two separate spaces;
they bring them into contact with each other, thus exposing and questioning the rigid and
false boundaries that Avey earlier imposes between the urban and the rural. Avey’s
cabdriver critiques the importance the out-islanders place upon the excursion: “And the
nice nice way they dress! The way they stepping! I tell you, you would think they was
taking a boat—a decent boat—to go to America or England or someplace that’s
someplace instead of just to a little two-by-four island up the way” (emphasis original
76). This contrasts with Avey’s refusal to accompany Aunt Cuney to Ibo Landing in her
dream when wearing her nice clothes. Like Avey, the cab driver, himself a local
Grenadian, has a specific opinion about sartorial protocols—what should or should not be
worn in rural spaces and what is a worthy destination for a trip. The out-islanders are not
worried about the toll the rough elements of the excursion will take on their meticulously
designed and sewn clothing. To them, the nice clothes speak to the importance they
50
The cab driver’s observation also echo’s the sentiments of Maxine Lavon Montgomery’s argument in “A
Pilgrimage to the Origins: The Apocalypse as Structure and Theme in Toni Morrison’s Sula” where she
discusses the problem with black communities’ attempts to imitate a Western culture that excludes them.
She argues that black communities must reject linearity and develop “a sense of self not bound to linearity”
(128).
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bestow on the place, not on what others deem appropriate for the rural landscape. The
return to Carriacou is their most important annual event of group revivalism, and as such,
their clothes reflect their respect for this spiritual excursion. The out-islanders’ comfort
with “cross-dressing” so to speak, by wearing their urban dress to the rural island implies
their ability to easily move across urban and rural boundaries without confusing the
spaces.
After seeing a model for inhabiting and moving back and forth between the urban
and the rural spaces, Avey also witnesses a model for what to do with her knowledge of
Ibo Landing in South Carolina. In reading this island scene, reviewers51 have generally
suggested that Avey finds her roots or connection to Africa here, but that is not entirely
the case. If this were the site of roots for Avey, then this would be the site for her return,
but it is not. Tatem is the site of Avey’s own annual return and also the spiritual roots
claimed for her. By watching the celebration on Carriacou, she begins to understand the
possible revitalization her participation in the historical recovery of Ibo Landing would
provide to her community:
It was the essence of something rather than the thing itself
she was witnessing. Those present—the old ones—
understood this. All that was left were a few names of what
they called nations which they could no longer even
pronounce properly, the fragments of a dozen or so songs,
the shadowy forms of long-ago dances and rum kegs for
drums. The bare bones. The burnt-out ends. And they clung
to them with a tenacity she suddenly loved in them and
longed for in herself. Thoughts—new thoughts—vague and
half-formed slowly beginning to fill the emptiness. (240)
51
See, for example, Barbara Christian’s “Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall’s
Praisesong for the Widow”, Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego’s The Search for Wholeness and Diasporic
Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature, Carol Boyce Davies’s “Black Women’s Journey
into Self: A Womanist Reading of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow,” and Guy Wilentz’s
“Towards a Spiritual Middle Passage Back: Paule Marshall's Diasporic Vision in Praisesong for the
Widow.”
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The distinction between the essence of the thing and the thing itself is particularly
important for Avey’s experience. The piecing together of what remains within the
community’s cultural memory, no matter how sparse, is enough for the necessary
spiritual renewal. In other words, it is the dedication to and practice of the ritual that
nurtures the individuals’ identities, more than the correctness of the practice. Coming
from her northern life of material excess, the fragments and bare bones required for the
excursion’s dance rituals to occur show Avey the bounty available in the essence, much
like she experiences the emptiness in her material excess.
Just as she sought financial security in the North and performs it by dressing and
behaving in a manner acceptable for her middle-class status, she is able to mimic the
behaviors of the out-islanders of Carriacou in order to learn how to reconcile the two
spaces and all they encompass. It is this knowledge she returns to the United States with.
She does not need to take the pieces of their African heritage because she already has that
of Ibo Landing which was established by her great-great-great-grandmother and
facilitated by her Aunt Cuney. The out-islanders’ excursion teaches her how to embrace
the heritage of Ibo Landing which links to their rituals and cultural connections. She
decides to reestablish her annual trips to Tatem, South Carolina and work to create a
community return, like the out-islanders have, bringing others from the urban North to
reconnect with their culture in the rural South.
Avey’s prospects of successful reintegration of the self depends ultimately upon
her ability to establish a complex African diasporic and American identity that embraces
both the urban North and the rural South, as well as the Caribbean. This results in her
splitting her time between the North and the South. The North is her home, the place she
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lives in and loves. The South is her racial and spiritual history, the place she needs. The
South provides knowledge that she seeks to pass onto children in order to balance the
material distractions of their lives that could cause a loss of self. Avey’s desire to mentor
black children in the South reflects Meridian’s desire to mother rural black communities
in the South. The difference between the two women, however, is that Meridian
relinquishes her role as community mother, as protector, when she reclaims her self,
while Avey steps into the position of community mother as cultural educator upon
balancing her identities. Avey also does not plan to deprive herself, as Meridian does,
when she steps into her maternal role. She does see the need, however, to reduce her
material possessions. On her flight from Grenada to the Unites States, Avey plans her
future which involves selling her house in North White Plains and renovating the home
Great-Aunt Cuney left her in Tatem. Selling her house in the North follows the material
cleansing that begins on the boat ride to Carriacou; since it is a much larger home than
she needs, she makes plans to downsize and remove excess materials from her life.
As mentioned before, it is important to distinguish between the South of the
United States and the directional south that positions the Caribbean south of Avey’s New
York. Avey’s third trip to the Caribbean occurs in 1977 at which point she had not been
to the South since 1951. Avey has not entered the post-Civil Rights South and has not
considered the new possibilities it might hold for her. The opportunity for redefinition of
the South that writers of African American literature of the post-Civil Rights era explore
is not something that Avey is able to recognize. In addition to giving her a model to
maintain her own identity, her time on Carriacou Island allows her to realize what is
already available to her. Prior to leaving for this cruise, her youngest daughter Marion
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asks “‘Why go on some meaningless cruise with a bunch of white folks anyway, I keep
asking you? What’s that supposed to be about?’” (13). Like Avey’s Grenadian cab driver,
Marion has opinions about appropriate travel destinations. For Marion, however, the
places she begs her mother to visit are Brazil and Ghana where she could learn some
racial and cultural history. After leaving Carricaou Island, Avey knows Marion would
understand her plans to create a space in Tatem where the black cultural heritage of Ibo
Landing can serve the same purpose as the trips to Brazil and Ghana. Marion, much like
Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959), represents the
project of some black nationalists to reconnect to Africa. Although Marshall does not feel
confined by the boarders of the Unites States, she offers a way to reinvest in the United
States South by reclaiming the black cultural heritage that exists there. Thus she suggests
that spiritual, symbolic return to the South as the vessel of cultural heritage could carry
significant connections to Africa.
Avey must reestablish her connections with the South, and in doing so extend her
knowledge of Tatem and the Igbo to other black children, especially her grandchildren.
She realizes her purpose in doing so is to take up the role Aunt Cuney use to perform,
imagining that “each summer she would ask that her two grandsons be sent to spent time
with her in Tatem, especially the youngest one, who had known the value of a dime-store
xylophone. If forced to, she would be as tyrannical in demanding that they be sent as her
great-aunt had been with her” (256). Avey’s special attention to her youngest grandson is
due to his ability to see value in things others do not, like a dime store xylophone. He
sees the importance of something that does not have a significant monetary value, but
that he could use to express himself musically. This transfers to the possibility of him
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understanding the value of Ibo Landing more than his siblings or other cousins. She
imagines extending the cultural knowledge beyond her own family by running a summer
camp where black children from the North can spend their summers. Her work as a
mentor or guide to these children is a step in connecting both community and individual
place-based identities in the South.
Marshall suggests that the history and rural black culture of the South could
provide a connection to ancestral roots needed to nurture the soul left hollow by
mainstream American materialism of the urban North. To Marshall, human connection
and an understanding of one’s self are healthier alternatives to consumerism. Marshall
does not, however, entirely reject the urban North. That both spaces are important in
Avey’s life reflects what she needs from the South and her ability to continue to function
in both spaces without sacrificing her identity.
The boundaries of both spaces have continued to become exceedingly blurred in
contemporary African American literature with the rural spreading North and the urban
spreading South. Unlike Marshall’s Praisesong, Jones’s Leaving Atlanta does not treat
the South as a necessarily healing space for her characters. She, instead, counters
idealized representations of the South by juxtaposing the urban South and the rural South,
in order to interrogate ideas of the South in the American socio-cultural imagination. Her
characters’ experiences of the urban and the rural disrupt the customary conflation of the
urban with the North and the rural with the South. Jones engages with the fluidity of the
South as an imagined space. Like Marshall, she addresses the problems associated with
the urban North-rural South divide by depicting characters that struggle to understand
their identities within the urban South. This struggle is due to the characters’
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conceptualizing the urban and the South as incongruous spaces. The representative urban
South in Jones’s novel is Atlanta, Georgia. The use of Atlanta is partially determined by
Jones’s interest in writing a fictionalized account of the historical Atlanta child murders
that took place between 1979 and 1981. Jones’s use of Atlanta as the setting for all of her
novels, similarly to Andrews’s use of Muskhogean County in his stories, suggests that
Atlanta has something specific to offer when challenging idealizations of the South52.
Geographically, Georgia is positioned as the deep South53 or lower South54 in
studies that differentiate between the physical regions of the South. However, W.E.B. Du
Bois recognizes the unique positioning of Atlanta in his essay “On the Wings of Atlanta.”
He refers to it as “South of the North, yet North of the South” (76). Although here Du
Bois refers to educational institutions and warns Atlanta not to become distracted by
capitalist industries, his assessment of Atlanta as a liminal space remains in contemporary
African American literature. Initially, it is Atlanta’s developing urban status and
advancement that position it as an in-between space, neither North nor South. In his book
length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), about the trial surrounding the
Atlanta Child Murders, James Baldwin takes issue with the common saying “I’m from
Atlanta. I’m not from Georgia” (2). He states that “Atlanta’s high visibility and
commercial importance do not mean that Atlanta is not in the state of Georgia” (3). He
goes on to suggests that the black administration55 overseeing the trial of Wayne
52
During a conversation with scholar Jürgen Grandt, we discussed the way each of Jones’s novels
contradicts a specific stereotype connected to the South. Leaving Atlanta rejects the idea of the South as
rural, and Silver Sparrow (2011) rejects the idea of the South supporting the traditional nuclear family.
53
Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck places Georgia in the same category as Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama,
and South Carolina in their survey of violence in the region.
54
Ira Berlin includes three additional states, places Georgia in the same category as Alabama, Arkansas,
Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas.
55
Eric Gary Anderson notes that “Mayor Maynard Jackson, Police Chief George Napper, Commissioner of
Public Safety Lee Brown, and many other Atlanta public officials at the time of the murders were black”
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Williams, most specifically Judge Clarence Cooper, allowed the media to close the child
murder case by linking Williams to all of the murders because Atlanta is in the South and
“could not be accused of administering ‘Southern’ justice” (4). However, Baldwin also
suggests that those who believed Wayne Williams’s guilty verdict did so in order to
remove the possibility that southern racial violence had occurred there.
Through its development and appeal, Atlanta gained the title “Black Mecca” to
replace the North deemed the failed “Promised Land.” The 2002 documentary America
Beyond the Color Line addresses the concept of Atlanta as the Black Mecca, noting its
appeal to young black professionals and the rise of high-end, self-segregated black
suburbs. In a 2006 interview with John Quinn, following the release of her second novel,
Jones articulates her specific interests in Atlanta and its regional positioning in the United
States. She explains, “[Atlanta] intrigues me—I am very interested in exploring the
concept of a new south, an urban south” (163). In his survey of the narratives of the
Atlanta Child Murders, Eric Gary Anderson notes that
the city of Atlanta plays two important roles: it is both a
socially exceptional (progressive, seemingly successful,
somewhat racially integrated) southern city and an
ecologically troubled and otherwise minimally progressive
place where the gleaming white buildings of urban renewal
contrast with the dead bodies of black children and fear
stoked by urban serial homicide. (196)
Jones’s treatment of Atlanta and her characters’ assumptions about the urban and the
rural in Leaving Atlanta warn against placing too much faith in the city as a Mecca when
in fact it is located in the South, which brings together urban difficulties and southern
threats.
(199) and views their actions, which some saw as pandering to the FBI investigators, frequently distanced
them from the black community. Baldwin is equally critical, but focuses his criticisms more harshly on the
circumstances surrounding the actual trial.
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A polyvocal novel, Leaving Atlanta is structured in three parts, “Magic Words,”
“The Direction Opposite of Home,” and “Sweet Pea.” The story is divided among and
unfolds through the narrative perspectives of three fifth graders Tasha Baxter, Rodney
Green, and Octavia Fuller as they attempt to understand the events unfolding around
them, specifically those related to the Atlanta Child Murders, and deal with the general
struggles of elementary school children. Tasha attempts to manage her repeated rejection
from the “in-crowd” at school and her parents’ recent separation, which ends as the fear
from the murders brings her father back home. Rodney spends his time as a loner at
school and dreading returning to his home where his fear of his father leads him to
convince himself that the children are being murdered by their fathers. Octavia is a good
student who is somewhat of an outcast at school and relates her experience of growing up
in a single parent household. Trudier Harris judges Jones’s use of child narrators a
success because they show “that horror can take up only so much space in an elevenyear-old mind. Everyday things with which children are concerned can be life stoppers as
much as murderers can be” (Scary 161).
Readers are presented with overheard adult conversations that the children do not
know how to process, along with their own thoughts about their experiences growing up
in Atlanta. Mr. Baxter, the first narrator Tasha’s father, blames general ignorance about
the history of the space the children live in as the reasons for the disappearances. Mr.
Baxter states, “‘That’s the problem. We been hushed up too long. These children don’t
know nothing about lynching. They don’t know nothing about white folks burning
niggers alive. That’s why we had to go out today—This whole thing is because black kids
don’t have sense enough to be scared of a strange white man’” (Jones 77). Although, the
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silence surrounding the South’s history of violence, specifically lynching, is correctly
seen here as contributing to the disappearance of the black children, I posit that the reason
for this silence depends largely on that prevailing if not deceptive construction of urban
Atlanta as not South. Since the urban is equated with the North and the rural conjures the
South, one can assume that the children, especially the black children, living in urban
Atlanta may not be warned of the dangers of the South because the children are not
considered to be in the South.
It is therefore the liminality of urban Atlanta that causes Jones’s characters’
spatial dilemma, as they grapple with their understanding of not just the place they live
but also their identities relative to that place. This struggle appears differently for the
narrators’ parents and the narrators themselves for several reasons. The child narrators
have lived in Atlanta for most or all of their lives, while their parents are all migrants to
the city. Tasha’s parents Mr. and Mrs. Baxter are from Alabama and Oklahoma;
Rodney’s parents Mr. and Mrs. Green are from Louisiana and Chicago; and Octavia’s
parents are from rural Georgia, though only her mother is with her in Atlanta. For the
most part, these migrations appear inconsequential to the development of the plot because
they are mentioned tangentially. However, the characters’ perceptions of the North and
the South, coupled with their experiences in other places, inform their lived responses to
Atlanta and the events of the plot. These interspatial connections are significant because
they dictate the knowledge and experience of the main characters and the formation of
their place-based identities.
Another important generational difference between the parents’ and the children’s
experiences is that the children are just learning how to fit in with their peers and they
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are, therefore, consciously trying to construct and problematize their identities. The
children attempt to situate their identities in Atlanta by bringing and grafting family
knowledge of other places into their Atlanta experience; this knowledge transfer ranges
from Oklahoma jump rope rhymes to the children’s sense of the best or worst candy that
can only be found in the South. Octavia, a.k.a. Sweet Pea, spends the most time
questioning and reflecting on Atlanta’s uniqueness as a city. This is likely due to the
point of view from which each character’s section in narrated. The novel moves inward,
from the most narrative distance with Tasha’s third-person point of view to Rodney’s
disconcerting second-person consciousness and finally ending with Octavia’s intimate
first-person reflection. This progression also reflects the narrators’ class-based positions
to the city. Tasha and Rodney live in middle-class suburbs further away from Oglethorpe
Elementary School and downtown Atlanta—a distance that requires they take a bus or get
rides from their parents. Octavia, on the other hand, lives across the street from the
projects and is within walking distance from their school. For Tasha and Rodney, the
school is where the tragedy of the child murders hits the closest to them because the
victims are their classmates. Octavia has a more intimate experience since she lives in the
same neighborhood as the victims.
Octavia’s class status locates part of her conceptualization of Atlanta in material
terms through her perception of her position in the structured routing of hand-me-down
clothes. Each year a box of clothes arrives in Atlanta for Octavia from her older cousin,
Nikky, in Chicago, and each year Octavia’s clothes are boxed and shipped to her younger
cousin, Kay-Kay, in Macon. The only items in the box Octavia acknowledges are the
fancy dresses that end up hanging in her closet unworn for two years before they are
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finally passed onto Kay-Kay. Octavia’s mother suggests that these velvet dresses with
lace and satin are worn by Nikky in the pageants her mother enters her in, but Octavia
connects the dresses to daily life in Chicago. She thinks, “all [the dresses] have big
ribbons around the waist that tie in the back. That must be the style in Chicago. The
Windy City. I can see all those girls walking through the streets with their satin sashes
flapping behind them. That’s where I want to go the next time I get to go someplace”
(179). Since she associate Nikky with the clothes and the clothes with Chicago, she
transfers her imagined idealization of Chicago to Nikky as she muses on the kind of life
Nikky must live in the North. She even goes as far as to view the day she receives the box
of clothing every year as a surprise holiday she calls “Nikky Day” (180). She initially
understands Chicago as different from Atlanta because she has no place to wear the fancy
dresses she receives. Octavia wishes she were Nikky or that Atlanta was Chicago, but it
is not until the current moment of her narrative that she is able to develop a clearer
understanding of Atlanta.
The last time Octavia receives a box of clothes from Nikky, she reflects on where
Atlanta sits geographically. Octavia recognizes her/Atlanta’s positioning in-between
Nikky/Chicago and Kay-Kay/Macon. This causes her to question Atlanta in a new way.
Rather than focus on its spatial difference, she begins to align it with Chicago. While her
mother is boxing the dresses Octavia never got to wear, Octavia sees herself in both
Nikky and Kay-Kay: “All of a sudden I started laughing. It was like when somebody tell
you a joke and you don’t get it till half a day later. Kay-Kay probably think I get to wear
these dresses all the time. What if she call it ‘Sweet Pea Day’?” (183) Though it is
unclear if Octavia knows that Nikky may not get to wear these dresses all the time either,
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she does realize that she is playing the same role in Kay-Kay’s imagination that Nikky
plays in hers. Following this discernment, Octavia continues repositioning Atlanta by
trying to understand it in similar terms as she understands Chicago: “Chicago is the
windy city, but what is Atlanta? I asked Miss Grier one time and she say, ‘Atlanta is the
city too busy to hate.’ Mama say it’s the ‘Chocolate City.’ Kay-Kay probably think
everybody up here smile all the time and eat Hershey Kisses wearing velvet dresses”
(183-184). Given that she takes her cues about Chicago from the adults in her life and
from her fancy dresses, Octavia assumes Kay-Kay, too, is being relayed a message about
Atlanta like the kind she herself receives. From their young perspectives, the children
take literally the figurative city mottos voiced by adults. As an Atlanta citizen, however,
Octavia knows that these adult precepts do not accurately reflect her experience in the
city. From Octavia’s point of view the humor in the situation is the misrepresentation of
her city’s identity and her own reality. Although Octavia recognizes the possibility for
Atlanta to be like Chicago/the North or like Macon/the South, she fixates on her desire
for Atlanta to be Chicago because she longs to imagine herself around her idealization of
the North. Jones appears to propose that constructing her identity around a false ideal of
Atlanta is potentially harmful to that identity, as we will see with Tasha’s father, when he
experiences the “real” Atlanta.
Octavia’s nuanced musings about Atlanta’s identity mirror her understanding of
the relationship between identity and place, as she shows through her conflation of Nikky
and Kay-Kay with Chicago and Macon, respectively. At a more personal level, her
interest in the city’s identity relative to her own identity is influenced by her lower-class
circumstances. Even though Rodney is uninterested in friends, he does not want other
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students to associate him with the free or reduced-lunch kids. This causes him to
disassociate himself from Octavia on more than one occasion. His curiosity about her
intelligence and strength, however, makes him watch her constantly. During one such
moment, the material confirmation of her lower-class status makes him uneasy: “From
where you are standing, you see the small piece of cardboard covering a hole in the
bottom of her shoe. You turn away, embarrassed to glimpse something as intimate as
poverty” (96). Rodney’s description of poverty as intimate suggests his middle-class
discomfort at knowing he has more than his classmate. Even though other free-lunch kids
can acknowledge living near one another and thus “knowing” one another, class
functions as a distinct barrier in these children’s relationships. It does not, however,
protect Rodney from falling victim to the Atlanta child murderer.
Jones acknowledges class and gender as the points of tension within her all black
community in Atlanta, and that tension influences her novels’ themes. In another
interview she addresses her own perception of class as a child in Atlanta: “Before the
murders, I thought being middle-class meant that you didn’t get free lunch. But after the
murders, I knew what a privilege it was. It meant whether or not you got to live” (qtd. in
Grandt, “(Un-)Telling” 73). While the fictional Rodney figures a way around the
protection his class affords him, Baldwin notes that one of the mothers of the young
victims cited “the economic status of the victims” (54) as the reason for the social
indifference towards the murders. Baldwin argues that the disappearance and murders of
black children, who were by and large poor, brought class tensions to the surface within
the black community56.
56
Class tensions, however, were not the only anxieties invoked by the disappearances and murders. Race
and gender were also of concern with the majority of the victims being male and the distrust of many in the
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The first child abducted within the narrative of the novel, but chronologically the
tenth to be kidnapped is Jashante. At the time of his seizure, he is selling car air
fresheners in an attempt to help his mother financially. His activities during his abduction
and his living in the same neighborhood as Octavia highlight the significance of class in
the children’s experiences in Atlanta, whether or not they fully understand its structure.
Octavia makes a clear distinction between living across from the projects, as opposed to
in them, when she receives a ride home from one of her teachers. In this moment, she
sees her neighborhood as dingy and unkempt, but through her teacher’s eyes. She has
explanations for every imperfection that does not reflect poorly on those who live in the
neighborhood, but she keeps most of them to herself. Her resistance to being identified as
poor intensifies her desire for a city in which she could wear Nikky’s nice dresses instead
of jeans that are not long enough to cover her socks or a corduroy jacket she has worn all
the fuzz off. Like Avey’s performance of class and place through her clothing, Octavia
sees urban Chicago offering her the opportunity to change her class status. Unlike Avey,
however, Octavia rejects her desire for the beautiful dresses and better class status if
achieving it means losing her mother, which happens at the end of the novel as she is sent
away from Atlanta wearing one of Nikki’s fancy dresses.
The deceptive, subconscious substitution of Atlanta for Chicago because of its
urban-ness also defines the parents’ understanding of where they choose to live and raise
their families. The difference for the parents, however, is that they have more firmly
established their identities in connection to urban Atlanta; consequently, it takes longer
for them to begin to question Atlanta and the space they, the parents, are actually
black community when the murder was identified as a black man. For a historical overview of violence
experienced by black youths see Wilma Kings African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from
Slavery to Civil Rights (2005).
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occupying. Octavia’s mother once had planned to go to Chicago on invitation by
relatives, but her unplanned pregnancy kept her in Georgia. Losing her dream of going to
the North, she subordinates Chicago as a spatial reference which limits her understanding
of Atlanta relative to her hometown of Macon. In doing so, Octavia’s mother replaces
Chicago with Atlanta as the urban North, nullifying in her mind the possibility of Atlanta
being the South.
The phone exchanges Octavia overhears between her mother and grandmother
can therefore be seen as arguments over whether Atlanta or Macon is the better place to
live. In their conversations, those two locales are depicted as the only two viable options;
presumably Octavia’s grandmother wants them to move back to Macon. In connection to
the murders taking place in Atlanta, Octavia overhears her mother on the phone saying
“‘Mama, you act like no black boy ever got killed in Macon, Georgia. At least here it is a
crime” (Jones 146). Octavia does not pay much attention to this conversation because it is
just like all the others. In the Atlanta-Macon debates, Atlanta is portrayed as more
progressive than Macon. Octavia’s mother has been defending her choice to live in
Atlanta for so long that her responses have become mechanical; she even refuses to
consider her mother’s concerns. After more child disappearances, however, she decides
that Atlanta is not a safe place for her daughter and sends Octavia further north to live
with her father in Charleston, South Carolina.
It is through Octavia’s narrative that Jones shows the imaginary constructions of
Atlanta as the North, but then in Tasha’s story that notion is undercut. While Octavia’s
mother consciously replaces the North with Atlanta, this is not the case for Tasha’s father
who migrates to Atlanta from Alabama. Mr. Baxter believes he has escaped the South
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with this move. That Atlanta is in fact still the South or in the South comes as a shock to
Mr. Baxter. His sudden realization that his urban/suburban experience is actually situated
within the South disrupts and complicates his understanding of his Atlanta place-based
identity. Mr. Baxter leaves his black middle-class neighborhood in Southside Atlanta to
help search for one of the missing children. His experience of the white suburbs north of
the city returns him to a different knowledge of the southern space. He reflects,
“Out there where we went, is like where I grew up. It’s a
trip. Twenty-five miles outside of Atlanta and bam, back in
Alabama.” He made a sound that was something like a
laugh. “White folks looking at you half mean, half scared.
The ones who came out to help us look were decent; I’ll
admit that. But most of them didn’t lift a finger. Just stayed
in their houses.” (78)
Mr. Baxter’s description of his encounter just outside of Atlanta’s urban space reflects his
lived, racial understanding of the South and his placement of Atlanta in the North. He
associates the South with a specific geographical space and with a set of attitudes and
behaviors based on experience, not region. Here Mr. Baxter metaphorically returns to the
South that is both spatial and temporal. The white suburbs of Atlanta, which he equates
with the Jim Crow South of his childhood, seem more rural than the suburbs closer to the
city. The memories of the Jim Crow South evoked in Mr. Baxter by this experience are
those of not only Emmet Till but also the young girls in the Birmingham, Alabama
bombing, the history of which he now wants to share with his two daughters. It is
important to note that his experience outside of the city does not cause him to associate
Georgia with the South; instead, it prompts him to see and feel Alabama. This, to him,
signals he is in the South. Later, this sobering experience leaves him on his knees, with
his head in his wife’s lap, as he struggles to reconcile the fact that Atlanta is still in the
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South or that the South still exists in Atlanta. It is both the metaphorical return he
experiences in his mind and the epiphany that Atlanta is not in the North that disrupt his
normative understanding of his self.
Mr. Baxter registers, ironically, that he is not in his presumed safe space and that
he is actually unaware of his own location. His disassociation of Atlanta from the South
is first confused when he discovers Atlanta’s situatedness within the South. And then he
is further bewildered when the searchers find the body of another missing black child, not
near the white suburbs outside Atlanta he has acknowledged as the South, but close to his
own neighborhood:
“That’s the thing,” Daddy said. “It was right around here.
I didn’t realize it at first. Word got around that they found a
body, a skeleton really, around a lake.”
“Around here?” Mama said. Her hand stopped its soothing
circles.
“I saw a policeman. A brother. He said they found her at
Niskey Lake. I said ‘Where the hell’s that?’ and he told me.
I said, ‘Man that’s not far from where I stay. I never heard
of no lake off of Cascade Road.’ He said, ‘Somebody did.’”
(80)
When Mr. Baxter learns that a body is discovered around a lake, it does not
immediately occur to him that it is in his own neighborhood. His understanding of his
neighborhood as urban excludes the presence of the lake. He has hitherto imagined
Atlanta as an endless urban space devoid of rural markers, such as a lake, connecting it to
the South. At each moment of his participation in the search for the missing children, Mr.
Baxter perceives more deeply that he does not know where Atlanta is or how his identity
fits in relation to this newly mysterious place. Just as he noted earlier that the children’s
lack of knowledge about the South was the cause of the disappearances and murders, he
admits that his own lack of geographic and spatial knowledge about Atlanta makes him
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vulnerable as well. In its undefined liminality, Atlanta becomes a space where issues of
race, class, place, and identity intersect in very real life and death situations. Residency in
Atlanta does not guarantee safety, and the inaccurate place-based identities constructed in
relation to the city can result in fragmentation. In Mr. Baxter’s case this fissure allows
him to reassess his situation and also makes for new self-definition as he decides to tell
his daughters about the South’s violent history.
In between Tasha’s narrative of Mr. Baxter realizing that urban Atlanta is the
South and Octavia’s narrative of Atlanta constructed as the North is Rodney’s narrative
in which the intersection of the North and the South creates a violent space. Jones’s
superior use of second-person narration, which turns Rodney into the narrative’s subject,
referred to as “you,” forms a barrier distancing Rodney from readers while also bringing
readers closer to the way he experiences the events as readers are told how to think and
feel at different moments57. Rodney has a clearer conception of Atlanta than Octavia and
Mr. Baxter because he is not concerned with it or how it defines him as an individual. He
views Atlanta as a large varied space in which downtown Atlanta is urban, holding the
dangers of his potential abduction and murder as a black male child during this string of
57
Jones states that her “idea for the second-person point of view in Leaving Atlanta is the idea of a
guardian angel almost speaking to Rodney. Almost how his adult self would have explained the world to
his younger self” (Grandt “(Un-)Telling” 74). Grandt, on the other hand, argues, “the disembodied
narrative voice addresses the protagonist directly in the second-person singular [… and] the narrative voice
does not so much record mimetically Rodney’s actions and thoughts as dictate them” (Shaping Words 111).
Harris, offering another perspective, claims “the effect is one of distancing [… and] Paradoxically and
simultaneously, the second-person narration also locks readers into Rodney’s situation […] Rodney is in a
situation comparable almost to watching a movie of his life, with him being dragged along as the reluctant
participant” (Scary 161). Harris’s reading of the use of second-person narration is the closest to my own.
The use of the uncommon second-person narration feels strange to readers because we are not expecting it,
but its use in this situation brings readers directly into the position of victim as we are directed through
Rodney’s section right along with him.
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serial killings. On the other hand, his home, despite its middle-class suburban location,
represents the violent South as he experiences it through his father’s physical abuse of
him intermingled with stories about picking cotton. His experiences at home and with his
family—from his mother doing everything for him, including homework assignments, to
his father’s unattainable expectations—not only prevent Rodney from establishing his
own identity, but also kindles his desires to return to the time before he was a even a
thought.
Jones depicts Rodney as being unable to convey his thoughts or be heard, and
always stumbling over his words. His second-person narrative attempts to explain his
decisions, but repeatedly exposes his inability to discern social cues, both in situations
with his peers and with adults. Throughout his narrative, Rodney frequents a convenience
store Lewis’s Market near his school. On several different occasions Rodney witnesses
community place-based identities at work. He initially reaps the benefits of this identity
bestowed upon him: “Mrs. Lewis has known your father since the two of them were
barefoot children in Plain Dealing, Louisiana, so she is convinced that your honesty is
guaranteed by superior genetic material reinforced by corporeal punishment” (102-103).
Unlike the other children, Rodney does not have to leave his backpack at the front of the
store. Mrs. Lewis relies on her connection to Rodney through their community placebased identity that allows her to know Rodney via his father. Mrs. Lewis’s identification
of Rodney as a trustworthy child and ally in the urban space is proved wrong as Rodney,
ironically, confides to readers that he steals candy from her two to three times a week.
While Rodney differs from this woman from his father’s childhood, he does
desire acceptance from his father. In another instance where he is at the convenience
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store with his father, Rodney has a more direct encounter with Mrs. Lewis and his
father’s southern identity:
Father once came into the store and chuckled at the sight of
this odd-looking confection.
“Virginia,” he exclaimed, tell me this ain’t what I think it
is.”
Mrs. Lewis laughed from behind the counter. “Claude L,
don’t tell me you got so old you don’t know a peanut patty
when you see one.”
Father laughed so deeply that he became unrecognizable.
“I haven’t seen one of these here since Hector was a pup!”
Mrs. Lewis said, “Go on and get one. Take one home to
Beverly, too.”
“Naw,” Father said. “She from Chicago. She don’t know
nothing about this here.” (103)
Through this exchange the import of this specific peanut patty is shown relative to a
community place-based identity. That Mr. Green declines to take one for his wife
because she is from Chicago suggests that this candy does not have merely generational
or black cultural significance. The peanut patty transports and links Mrs. Lewis and
Rodney’s father to a specific southern place—their growing up in Louisiana together.
Following the conversation between Mrs. Lewis and Rodney’s father, Rodney is
told to pick out a candy for himself. Rodney knows this to be a test but does not
understand its implication. He does not grasp the importance of this decision in relation
to the significance of place, but he does know that it will affect his father’s opinion of
Rodney’s identity. Rodney mentally removes the candies he actually wants because he
fears his father will view them, and thus him, as “dainty” or “too soft” and chooses the
one “that features a drawing of a grape dressed for combat” (104). Knowing that his
father is testing him, he chooses the Alexander the Grape candy, illustrating his belief
that his father wants him to make a masculine choice. This logic fails, however, because
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the only correct choice is the peanut patty. Rodney’s failure to choose the southern
peanut patty indicates his inability to process the exchange between his father and Mrs.
Lewis and to share their southern identity.
Recalling Marshall’s depiction of Avey, Rodney cannot return home to his
middle-class suburban neighborhood under the crushing weight of his family’s attempt to
perform the “Dick and Jane myth of American nuclear families” (Harris, Scary 161).
Unlike Avey, Rodney is unable to conform to his role in the white middle-class American
family and, instead, lives in terror of his dominating father. After leaving school without
his little sister, he debates whether or not he should return to take her home. He reflects,
“Nothing you know is in the direction you’re heading. Home is the other way” (Jones
139). Despite this assessment, Rodney does know what is in the direction he is heading.
He is seeking an end to his misery and believes it is in the direction of urban downtown
Atlanta. He continues,
At Martin Luther King Drive, you dart across four lanes of
traffic against the blinking warning of the cross signal. Car
horns scream, but the drivers accelerate when you find
yourself alive and disappointed on the north side of the
road. Carillon bells sing from the college campus nearby
and you walk toward downtown. Home is the other way.
(140)
His disappointment at not getting hit while crossing the busy street makes his mission
much more apparent: he ominously longs for death, which responds when Rodney
encounters the Atlanta child murderer and willingly gets in the man’s car.
This scene assumes a much greater consequence in Jones’s setting it at Martin
Luther King Jr. Drive, which runs from east to west, dividing the southern side of Atlanta
from downtown Atlanta. This decision re-invokes Alice Walker’s questions about the end
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of the Civil Rights Movement and its success. While Dr. King acknowledges forms of
injustice in the North58, his focus was predominantly on the condition of the South. In the
context of Atlanta, King served as president of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) headquartered in Atlanta. The SCLC helped build coalitions between
the North and the South, working towards freedom in the United States. Martin Luther
King Jr. Drive in Leaving Atlanta, however, does not represent freedom, or protection for
the urban black child, or a union between the North and the South. Jürgen Grandt reads
this as a scene of tragic irony, taking it back to the antebellum South, where the
movement across Martin Luther King Jr. Drive “harks back to the perilous journey of the
runaway slave; only now, the freedom to be found north of ‘the direction opposite of
home,’ even in the New Souths, is the liberty that comes with death” (113). Rodney as
the runaway child knows the dangers of his decision to head into the city rather than
home to his suburb.
For Rodney home represents a mentally and emotionally destructive South
embodied by his father’s deep connection to his rural Louisiana upbringing. Rodney’s
reflection on his inability to respond to his father, both due to not knowing how to
respond to his father’s southern nostalgia and his father’s silencing his attempts to speak,
present his father as the “Southland […] bogged down in a tragic effort to live in
monologue rather than dialogue” (King, “Letter”). Mr. Green expects Rodney to have
innate knowledge on a particular brand of southernness without teaching him about it.
This results in Rodney’s inability to negotiate his own life within the confines of a silent
South. Although Rodney’s mother is from Chicago, she does not bring a balance to his
58
Such as the northern black populations living urban ghettos and having nothing worth voting for in the
North, that he mentions in his “I Have a Dream” speech.
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father’s southernness. When she questions his treatment of their son, he responds with
definitive answers that go unchallenged. Instead of serving as an ally to her son, she
remains emotionally distanced from him and more interested in performing her class
status.
In many ways, Rodney’s existence has perpetually been at the oppressed and
oppressive intersection of the North and the South as symbolized through his parents.
This experience does not result in death for him, but it does make him suicidal, leading
him into the city. When he comes to the intersection at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, he
does not heed the “blinking warning of the cross signal.” The warning from this cross
signal suggests that the Martin Luther King Jr. Drive does not unite the urban downtown
of Atlanta with the south side of the city; instead, it marks a divide between the two.
Rather than waiting for the signal to change, Rodney chooses to go against traffic,
placing himself in harm’s way. His completed passage from the south side of the street to
its north side symbolizes his successful and active escape from his father. Rodney
presumes the urban downtown that couches his freedom in death as the grounds of the
Atlanta child murderer towards whom he flees. Invoking Martin Luther King Jr. again,
Rodney seeks justice through non-confrontational actions, coded in his entering “the car
as an act of passive resistance against his violent, domineering father” (Grandt, Shaping
113) or “passive suicide” (Harris, Scary 161). Rodney’s inability to construct or his lack
of desire for an identity shows the difficulties of being suspended between two dueling
spaces. More so than any of the other characters in the novel, Rodney represents the
junction of the North and the South and is helpless to situate his self in either or both.
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By inserting a reflection about Atlanta’s identity within the historical event of the
Atlanta Child Murders, Jones plants a very real stake in the perception of place. Her
characters’ understanding of place does not only function mentally and emotionally to
nurture them, but their lives are dependent upon it. Jones’s treatment of the urban South
in Leaving Atlanta further complicates the idea of the South and helps to develop the
South as a multifaceted space. In Leaving Atlanta the incongruous urban South dislocates
the urban experience and reinscribes fears of the South. This fear develops due to a lack
of awareness on the part of her characters and due to the idealization of the city as the
North. Jones challenges ideas about the South, but more important she challenges beliefs
that are associated with that space. Her representation of the southern city suggests there
is a danger in accepting imagined spaces, both rural and urban, as real. Jones constructs
the possibilities for the urban South—specifically Atlanta, a place she is very interested
in exploring—in her realistic treatment of space. She suggests that if the urban South as
the new South is to be a productive place for African Americans, the identities
constructed within it must accurately reflect it.
***
These interrogations of the urban North-rural South dichotomy in African
American literature of the post-Civil Rights era address the potential jeopardy to placebased identities when obviously complex places are reduced to certain generalized
stereotypes. While Marshall dramatizes how both the urban North and the rural South can
function together, Jones illustrates that the urban does exist in the South and that neither
the urban, as North or South, nor the South, as urban or rural, can be romanticized
because this glamorization comes at the expense of its occupants. Additionally, both
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authors present class divisions within the novels’ black communities as inimical to the
wellbeing of the community. Marshall sees the reaffirmation of black cultural
connections as a way to bridge class divisions, while Jones does not offer a solution, but
does attempt to undermine class privilege by including the middle-classed Rodney as one
of the victims in the Atlanta Child Murders. Jones shows that class divisions affect
children’s understandings of their selves in similar ways they influence adults, as
Marshall depicts in Praisesong. Ultimately, both writers demonstrate the role conceptions
of place have on identity formation.
The place-based identities that Avey learns how to reconcile and those Mr. Baxter
and Octavia have disrupted are also split between community definition and individual or
self-definition. Community-defined identity is most commonly associated with the
stereotype marking community as southern, while the individual identity is connected
with the North and its northern individualism. The community-defined identity can be at
odds with the individual identity, or prevent the self from being independently and
wholly defined. The following chapter considers Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits
and Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways relative to the role of community-defined identity,
which migrants reencounter upon returning to the South, plays in the reintegration of the
self.
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CHAPTER III. COMMUNITY-DEFINED IDENTITY AND THE SOUTH IN
RANDALL KENAN’S A VISITATION OF SPIRITS AND TINA MCELROY ANSA’S
UGLY WAYS
In her essay “Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary AfroAmerican Women’s Fiction” (1985), Barbara Christian charts the development of the
black woman’s search for self, from the nineteenth century through the 1980s. She marks
the 1950s as a significant turning point in novels by black women writers. Christian
references Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953) as the work that sets the tone for
future novels that explore the process of self-definition. Christian notes that following the
Civil Rights Movement the major shift in the novels by black women writers is their
general representation of the black community as “a major threat” (240) to the process of
black women’s self-definition. Since Christian’s survey of the literature, both black men
and women writers have continued to explore the possibilities of the black community
that was disrupted by the integration of the Civil Rights Movement. The community is
portrayed as an obstacle to not only black women’s full self-definition, but also to black
men’s self-definition. Although sometimes an obstruction, the idea of community must
be interrogated and incorporated into the individual’s identity for that identity to be made
whole and properly spatially situated.
Farah Jasmine Griffin deduces that the importance of the spatial South is tied up
with the role of the ancestor, which makes the South “the place where community and
history are valued over Northern individualism” (9). Within the framework of return
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migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era, the return to the South incorporates
communities into the process of individual self-definition. The characters must negotiate
between the community’s power over their identity and their own desires for selfhood.
Rejection of northern individualism is not necessary, but what seems imperative is the
balance between community-defined and individual identities.
Hortense Spillers discusses the implications of the end of the twentieth century on
both the African American individual and the African American community. Although
she claims that it is finally time for scholars to explore the interior side of WEB Du
Bois’s idea of racial double-consciousness, she is also concerned with the loss of
community for African Americans. Spillers asserts “that the postmodern economy, both
in real and symbolic terms, has been devastating for both the concept and practice of
‘community’” (383). She goes on to identify the loss of community for African
Americans as a result of systemic changes of the post-Civil Rights era and as “something
quite private and unofficial” that has led to the dissipation of “certain social capabilities”
(383). Spillers acknowledges that she feels a personal loss of community, one that is
both familiar and somewhat nostalgic.
The problem with the desire for the familiar and nostalgic experience seems to be
its potential to disrupt or hinder the development of the concept and practice of
community. Alice Walker states that “What the black Southern writer inherits as a natural
right is a sense of community. Something simple but surprisingly hard, especially these
days, to come by” (In Search 17). Walker acknowledges that a sense of community has
become sparse. Like Spillers, Walker’s conception of community is specific to time and
place, seen as static. She suggests that while community may not necessarily be found
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any longer, a sense of it lingers in the South and is only available to southerners. In her
analysis of novels primarily by contemporary ethnic American women writers—
including Toni Morrison—Magali Cornier Michael notes that these writers theorize that
community is always in a state of redefinition “as members enter and leave and as the
interests of individual members change. As such, communities have the potential to be
inclusive and to create spaces for difference—although they can also function to ensure
sameness through exclusionary practices” (12). These contemporary depictions of
community reject the idea that it is static. They instead construe it as a potentially
positive or negative force depending on the community’s desire to make space, or not, for
its individual members.
It is a difficult task to let go of the impression that community is static, as Spillers
suggests. This is because the new form of community, with ongoing and multiple entries
and exits by its members, old, new, and varied, becomes challenging to identify. Spillers
proposes that “An apparently homogeneous social form with strictly determined
borderlines, within and without, is no longer located in the same place, or, perhaps more
accurately, no longer configured in the same way, if by that we mean zones of safety in
the familiar” (384). In other words, it is not that the community no longer exists or exists
elsewhere, but that the community has been reconstituted, and thus serves a different
function. The difficulty in identifying these alternate constructions of community has
resulted in little scholarship on community in contemporary African American literature.
In a study that attempts to understand recent representations of community in
contemporary African American literature, Philip Page argues that novels by John Edgar
Wideman, Toni Cade Bambara, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and Ernest Gaines
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“document the spiritual and psychic disintegration that accompanies the loss of
community and cultural heritage as well as the redemptive possibilities of reaffirming
such ties” (Reclaiming 5). Page interrogates the ways these novelists address
contemporary issues of community and how their novels open up spaces to reclaim the
concept of African American community and even larger conceptions of American
community. He notes, however, that none of his focal novelists offers a solution for
recovering the community. He even shows how some writers, such as Gaines, depict the
failure of community after it is given the space to come back together. Page further
argues that the model of the empowered community in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, for
instance, also fails because it exists in the liminal space of a mythical Island, outside of
reality.
An additional feature Page discusses in relation to contemporary African
American literature in its engagement with the idea of community is authorial use of
polyvocality to forefront the importance of community through the presentation of
multiple narrative perspectives. Interestingly, as a logical factor of the migrants returning
to communities in the South, that trope of plural narrators is also common in African
American return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era. It is present in seven of the
eight novels discussed in this dissertation. Just as having a space for multiple narrators
strengthens the idea of manyness, and by extension, it can also drive the community
members to stand out as sovereign individuals and voices separate in community, even in
smaller, rural places.
The return migration novel of the post-Civil Rights era normally depicts
characters’ returns to smaller, more rural communities as a contrast to their experiences
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in large urban cities. Sometimes the returnees arrive as outsiders to communities they
previously have no experience with, as in the cases of Walker’s Meridian and Andrews’s
Lea. At other times, the return is to a place where the characters can build their own
communities, as with Andrews’s Rosiebelle Lee and Paule Marshall’s Avey. Being an
outsider to a community or being the center of it can pose its own challenges. The most
difficult return presented in return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era, however,
is the return to a home community. This chapter will look at the effect home communities
have on the identities and experiences of characters in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of
Spirits (1989) and Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways (1993).
I will be looking at the subconscious internalization or the adamant rejection of
identities ascribed to characters by their small, rural, and all-black southern communities
that purport to know the characters based on their membership in the community. The
sense of fragmentation experienced by return migration characters appears to result from
a split between a community-defined identity, which is bestowed upon them by their
mere location within or familial descent from a specific group, and an individual identity,
which is self-defined. The community-defined identity can force out or hinder the fullest
development of the non-conformist individual identity. For some migrants, loss of the
home community upon departing the South leaves the characters, unable to conceptualize
their individual identity, holding onto their community-defined identity, while for others
the distance allows them to explore their individual identities, although self-definition is
still restricted.
I examine the family as the home community in Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits.
Kenan’s characters face different issues with their familial community based on age,
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gender, and sexuality. Looking comparatively at Jimmy Greene, the return migrant, and
Horace Cross and Ruth Davis-Cross, who have never left, however, will show the
different concessions to his identity the return migrant makes versus those made by the
characters that never leave. In Ansa’s Ugly Ways, I go outside of the family to the black
citizens of Mulberry, read here as the home community. The Mulberry community is less
visible in Ugly Ways than Ansa’s other novels because the characters in Ugly Ways are
focused on a death in the family, but the community’s presence in the periphery dictates
the actions and feelings of the main characters. As with the first text, I look
comparatively at the three Lovejoy sisters’ inability to escape their community-defined
identities. For all of these characters, the reconciliation of their community-defined
identities and their individual identities must occur in the space of the South and the
authors suggest that that reconciliation is critical to the characters’ survival.
Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits is a complex polyvocal narrative that
experiments with multiple narrative forms. The story moves between the events of two
specific days April 29-30, 1984 and December 8, 1985 with third-person narration. The
1984 sections are told from Horace’s point-of-view, while the 1985 sections shift
between the viewpoints of Jimmy, Ruth, and Zeke Cross. These accounts are separated
by “confession” sections from the first-person accounts of Jimmy and Horace. Within
these first- and third-person sections are short drama scenes and ethnographic sketches59
of the black community of Tims Creek in fictional York County, North Carolina. These
59
The ethnographic sketches in A Visitation of Spirits are less frequent than those in Kenan’s short story
“Let the Dead Bury the Dead” which also experiments with form as it complies documents produced by
Jimmy Greene to create a more thorough image of York County. In A Visitation of Spirits, the two main
sketches “Advent”—the account of a community’s hog killing—and “Requiem for tobacco”—the account
of a community helping harvest tobacco—reinforce the gendered roles within the community, while
depicting the community coming together to help its members.
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various forms help Kenan create an image of York County’s black and white
communities as reluctant to let go of the past. The white community celebrates the
history of the white Crosses and plantation life through the production of a local play,
while the black Crosses cling to tradition that brought them out of slavery and led to their
current success as leaders of their community. The black Cross family is the spiritual and
moral leaders of the community; the older members of the family serve as deacons and
deaconesses on the board overseeing the church their great-grandfather established after
emancipation. The novel focuses on the events leading to and surrounding the suicide of
sixteen-year-old Horace who is unable to live up to his community-defined identity
despite his attempts to reject his homosexual identity.
Alongside Horace’s struggle, Jimmy shows how he explores his homosexual
desires while attending college and living in Durham, NC and also the way he is able to
suppress those desires upon returning to Tims Creek. Unlike Horace, Jimmy does not
allow his homosexual desires or activities to become a part of his individual identity
because, like Horace, he believes he cannot escape the identity he is assigned by his
family. Comparatively, Horace and Jimmy have similar backgrounds: both are raised by
grandparents after their own parents are deemed unacceptable parents; both are “chosen”
as future heads of the community, Jimmy as religious leader and Horace as secular
leader; they are both gay60 black men in a religious, southern family that does not allow
them to express their sexuality; and, finally, although there is nearly a twenty year age
difference between them, they are of the same generation in their family.
60
While critics generally agree about Jimmy’s homosexuality, it is important to note that Jimmy and the
narrator only allude to homosexual practices and he does not identify himself as gay at any point, not even
during his confession sections.
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The main identity struggle present in A Visitation is whether or not the rural
community can acknowledge homosexuality as a piece of one’s identity. Critics read A
Visitation as reworking James Baldwin’s treatment of gay characters and the spaces they
live. Robert McRuer, for instance, argues that it is a revision of Go Tell it on the
Mountain with Horace’s death showing “that the gay individual cannot and does not
survive such attempts at accommodation with the church” (82). Sharon Holland proposes
that Kenan signifies upon Giovanni’s Room in order to “rewrite the space of blackness to
include the presence of a black gay male” (111). To Shelia Smith McKoy, A Visitation is
in direct conversation with Another Country. McKoy adds that “Kenan reconciles what
had been previously irreconcilable in black southern literature: that it is possible to define
black gay manhood” (33). These critics generally agree that the novel imagines a space in
the South where homosexuality does not remain positioned in opposition to blackness
and manhood (Holland 113-114, Littler 44, McKoy 17, Wester 1047). Horace’s suicide at
the end of the novel, however, complicates the success of Kenan’s project.
In addition, the reviewers differ on the outcome of Horace’s suicide. McRuer,
Holland, and McKoy posit that Horace’s death has the potential to change the
community. Maisha Wester cites an interview in which “Kenan proclaims that Horace
has to die in order for the community to change: ‘They have to understand the
devastation they’re wreaking on certain people and tragedy most effectively disturbs and
moves people’” (1050). However, as Trudier Harris points out, Horace’s funeral is not
depicted within the text (Scary 132) and readers do not see a community aware of its
actions in relation to Horace’s demise. Harris and Lucy Littler question the view that
Horace’s suicide actually changes the community when that community does not even
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discuss his death nor it causes. For Harris and Littler, Horace’s death is a tragedy lacking
purpose. I agree with Harris and Littler; there is no textual evidence that suggests
Horace’s suicide has a clear impact on the Tims Creek community. Furthermore, I would
argue that there are several moments in the text that suggest Horace and his homosexual
identity could have had a place in the Tims Creek community, which desires change
itself. It is his familial community, led by Zeke and Jonnie Mae Cross-Greene, that
destroys Horace by rejecting his attempts at self-definition. The purpose of Horace’s
death, then, speaks to the need for a re-understanding of community and a questioning
how community ideals are actually being used by the smaller familial community. The
impact Horace’s death has is on readers more so than it is on the fictional Tims Creek
community.
Placing this community in the post-Civil Rights era rural South challenges the
community to leave behind its antiquated practices and to openly create a space for those
individuals, like Horace, who question the community’s restrictive belief system.
McRuer cites a 1991 interview in which Henry Louis Gates Jr. discusses gay characters.
Gates states, “I want Randall Kenan to, as it were, take Horace to the big city in his next
novel” (qtd. in Rowell 454). While McRuer sees this as a “predictable” (69) response
since the move to the big city is an exhausted trope in gay and lesbian literature, Gates’s
response comes from the desire to see Horace succeed, with his life intact. The problem
with taking Horace to the city is that placing him “in an urban area where, presumably, a
‘black gay identity’ is more developed and secure effaces, if not jeopardizes, the
possibility of transforming the community in which Horace is already located and—more
important—undermines Kenan’s critique of the ‘regime of sameness’” (70). Kenan aims,
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then, to keep Horace in and return Jimmy to the rural space in order to confront the
attitudes of the static community. The two characters need to be in a space where they
can affect necessary and noticeable change.
Additionally, the big city would allow Horace to disappear among its large
population, rather than visibly emerge which is the advantage the small Tims Creek
community offers. Holland argues that rather than subtly addressing identity that is both
black and gay, “Kenan places Horace’s struggles in a changing South, at the table of not
only a black family but also one with a church going legacy to fulfill […] challenging
notions of blackness and bringing the imaginative project back ‘home.’” (114). In other
words, the problem facing Horace is not that he is in the South or in a rural
environment—because that space is in a state of change—but that he is oppressed by the
fundamentalist black church61 and his familial community. Like other African American
migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era, A Visitation uses the changing state of the
South to re-imagine a space for self-definition. Kenan’s characters, however, are still
attempting to make sense of the South as a changing region and struggle to define their
individual selves while being held to their community-defined identities.
In order to maintain the Cross family’s reign over Tims Creek, Jonnie Mae seeks
to preserve the rural community her grandfather Ezra Cross developed following the
Civil War. In doing so, Jonnie Mae refuses to let another generation pass without
producing a reverend to fulfill Ezra’s dreams for the church. Jonnie Mae’s father Thomas
Cross, along with her brothers Zeke and Jethro, and her son and nephews all fail to
become reverends but instead become farmers, alcoholics, or leave the South entirely.
61
See Marlon Riggs’s documentary Black Is and Black Ain’t (1994) and Charles Nero’s “Towards a Black
Gay Aesthetic” (1997).
138
Jonnie Mae takes charge of her daughter’s children in the hopes that they would do what
those before her were unable to do. Jimmy remembers his calling to the church was not a
calling, but a result of his siblings failure to fulfill the role:
By the time I was fourteen, Isador had gone off to school.
Franklin had proven to be a serious student, a hard worker
in the fields, and an excellent athlete, respectful and dutiful.
But in the end, just like his uncles, he loved women more
that he loved the Lord. So I became the pious one, the holy
one. (174)
Like the majority of the last two Cross generations, Isador, Franklin, and Jimmy all do
well in school and Jonnie Mae sees to it that they receive college educations. The weight
of familial expectations shifts from Franklin, if it was even there to begin with, onto
Jimmy. Jimmy does not love women more than he loves the lord but he internalizes the
limited identity placed upon him by his family more than his brother does. His
affirmation of this community-defined identity prevents him from realizing his own
subjectivity.
Jimmy’s encounter with his identities comes once he leaves Tims Creek for
college. Jimmy confesses, “when I stepped through the gates of those hallowed halls at
North Carolina Central, I became acquainted with the intoxicating rush of freedom. I was
far from the roving eyes of the deacon and deaconesses. I was in my own hands” (174).
He is able to experiment with his individuality outside of Tims Creek, free from the
constraining gaze of his family. His account of negotiating between his individual
identity and community-defined identity is not presented as a struggle. Instead, Jimmy is
able to compartmentalize these identities into the spaces in which he can preform them.
He notes that during his undergraduate days in Durham, “[he] was sure [he] was the
antichrist come, and was perfectly happy to be so. [He] slept with anything that was
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willing” (174). Although Jimmy does not claim a homosexual identity, it is repeatedly
suggested through his sexual struggles with his wife Anne, from his impotence during
their first sexual encounter to his resignation after finding out she is having an affair.
Most explicitly, he admits to exploratory homosexual desire and activities when
counseling Horace. He tells him, “we’ve all done a little…you know...experimenting. It’s
a part of growing up” (113). Jimmy’s experimenting ends when he completes his degree
and begins seminary school; however, he does not give up men for women, but turns to
celibacy.
Although his separate identities are not presented as an obstacle, he does admit to
duplicity. He acknowledges dishonesty in performing his community-defined identity
when in Tims Creek and experimenting with his individual identity in Durham.
Reflecting on his time in college, Jimmy concedes,
my only regret being that my aunts and my grandmother
never seemed to suspect that I was a hypocrite, a liar. For
when I came home I still read the Scriptures in church and
taught Bible school, only to return to school and recruit the
first co-ed who gave me a willing glance. I realize that this
was the true sin. (174)
He regards his hypocrisy as his “true sin,” but fails to desist from it. His candor, resolve,
and ability to voice his hypocrisy hold the key to enacting public change in the Tims
Creek community. Kenan suggests that Jimmy’s failure to effect that change and the
unlikelihood of it happening in the future result from his unwillingness to outwardly
define his self. He leaves his difference in Durham and instead accepts the identity
determined by his family.
Jimmy’s failure is most visible during the scenes where he receives opportunities
to actually move the Tims Creek community out of its ideologic stasis, but instead he
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responds passively. When Horace seeks counsel from Jimmy, as his cousin and reverend,
Horace is left confused and alone by Jimmy’s inability to define his own subjectivity.
Jimmy’s struggles with homosexuality show up in his conversation with Horace, but this
conversation quickly deteriorates as Jimmy goes from affirming “You’re perfectly
normal” to “Horace, you’ll cha—Change? Well, there’s nothing to change. You’re
normal” to “You’ll change” (113-114). This sequence of utterances confirms for Horace
that his feelings are in fact abnormal and must be changed, not accepted. The advice
Jimmy finally offers Horace comes from his own experience. He says, “Ask God to give
you strength and in no time […] You’ll be fine believe me” (114). This approach may
have been feasible for Jimmy because he was able to work through his desires outside of
the intrusive space of the community. It is even suggested that his experiences with other
men were limited to the physical. Horace, on the other hand, has been in love with at least
one young man, Gideon, whom he ultimately rejects out of fear. Jimmy’s rejection of
self-definition can be read as the only way in which he is able to repress his
homosexuality, while Horace’s desire for self-definition forces him to confront his
homosexuality and leaves him unable to reject it.
Jimmy reflects on how he might have handled differently his conversation on
homosexuality with Horace but he only knows how to fill the role created for him. Jimmy
confesses to readers, “I keep dreaming about him, about that morning. Keep thinking
there was something I could have done. Said. If not that morning then before, long
before…but that’s just me being a romantic” (36). This initial expression of regret over
Horace’s situation and suicide turns self-centered when Jimmy considers himself a
romantic. That he sees the possibility of preventing Horace’s suicide as unrealistic
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suggests that he still does not understand why Horace kills himself. Jimmy appears more
interested in freeing himself of responsibility than in taking action so the community does
not drive another youth to suicide.
Jimmy’s righteous confessions contradict his actual behavior. His reflections on
his feelings about events and his interactions with community members show good
intentions, but his conduct and reactions reveal him as the moral watchdog his family
desires him to be. Prior to recounting his conversation with Horace, he defends his
passivity during a meeting with a sick community member:
How could I communicate that I was not, did not want to
be the holy and pious dictator of a pastor they had been
used to for all their lives […] There was no way to say: I
have not come here to judge you. To say: I want to
introduce a new way of approaching Christian faith, a way
of caring for people. I don’t want to be a watchdog of sin,
an inquisitor who binds his people with rules and
regulations and thou shalts and thou shalt nots. But looking
at those eyes so full of past hurt and past rejection and past
accusation, I could only smile and let be what was. (110)
Even after Horace’s death, Jimmy still finds it hard to convey his acceptance of
community members as individuals. As the wife of the community’s bootlegger drinks a
beer in front of him, he mentally rationalizes his compliance to himself by repeating,
“there was no way to say.” Rather than there being no way to articulate his beliefs, it is
just that Jimmy is incapable of voicing the necessary change for his congregation. Jimmy
chooses the most self-serving and expedient response that does not require him to break
from his family’s position in the community nor standout as different in Tims Creek. It
seems Jonnie Mae chooses Jimmy because he lacks leadership qualities. Jimmy accepts
that he is who people say he is and he even helps to maintain the status quo.
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During Jonnie Mae’s funeral, Jimmy demonstrates his continued enforcement of
his family’s morals when he rejects his estranged mother Rose. Only his uncle Lester
shows her compassion when he lightly places his hand on her shoulder. Jimmy wonders
about this encounter during one of his confessions:
How much I could have learned from her. She had raised
her fist to her home, to her God, to her people, and chased
after her heart…and lived. What had she seen? The scars
were evident to me. I saw them in her hands, in her neck, in
her face. How had it changed her? For she could never
return home. What did she come to understand of love and
sex and lust and freedom, of violence and betrayal, of evil
and hypocrisy, and all the naked pain I am sure she
endured? Does knowing those things make living easier?
(122)
Jimmy considers these questions. He does not see himself doing what she did, however,
nor is he able to forgive her for doing these things in order to ask her any of these
questions. He once again demonstrates his own hypocrisy. He paradoxically is unable to
forgive her for the features he admires about her. Among the many questions he
formulates about her life experience, he states that “she could never return home,” yet he
fails to ask why she cannot return. Rose had attempted to return home several times, but
she was unable to live under the control of Jonnie Mae. Rose fails to suppress her
individual identity and Jonnie Mae’s inability to create a space for difference and selfdefinition positions Rose as an outsider, an oddity in her family. Rose cannot return home
because the community fails to adapt and create a space for her within itself. Jimmy’s
inaction, maintained even after Jonnie Mae’s death, fails to reshape the Tims Creek
community into a place that would accept Rose.
In addition to overlooking the most important question about his mother’s
experience, Jimmy also asks the wrong questions about his own reasons for not leaving
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the South. His brother and sister “had both been singing the same old song to [Jimmy].
Leave North Carolina. Get out. As if it were on fire. As if, like Sodom or Gomorrah, the
Almighty would at any moment rain down fire to punish the wicked for all the evil done
on Southern soil” (34-35). He accepts that his siblings have left the South, but he does not
understand their concern over his staying in the South. Isador and Franklin have equated
the Tims Creek community with the rest of the state and the rest of the South. Jimmy
responds to their concerns with “one simple question: ‘If we all “get out,” who will
stay?’” (35). This question once again misses the point; Jimmy should ask, instead, why
they should stay, or what can be achieved by staying. Jimmy implies here that he returns
to Tims Creek simply to help populate it. This is where critics62 have generally given
Jimmy too much credit. He cannot change the community until he is willing to confront
his identities and define his self.
While Jimmy “was perfectly happy” to behave as the antichrist (174), Horace
cannot accept his behaviors that are in opposition to his church and religion. Of course,
Jimmy’s actions occur in the city, outside of the Tims Creek community. Unlike Jimmy,
Horace does not need to leave Tims Creek to encounter freedom, but his family prevents
him from embracing that liberty. His most successful attempt to thrive in Tims Creek is
through his friendship with four white boys—Nolan, Ian, Jay, and Ted—who have lived
outside of the South. His friendship with them lasts three months: “he remembered the
months of September through November as a rare reprieve from anxiety. He had found
his group” (236). The reprieve granted by his inclusion in this group is distraction from
62
See, for instance, Shelia Smith McKoy’s, “Rescuing the Black Homosexual Lambs: Randall Kenan and
the Reconstruction of Southern Gay Masculinity” (2001) and Robert McRuer’s The Queer Renaissance:
Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (1997).
144
his struggle with homosexuality and self-acceptance. He is drawn to this group of boys
because, like himself, they “did not fit into the archaic, close-knit, rural ways of York
County. They were from elsewhere” (236). While Horace is not really from elsewhere, he
identifies with the boys to the extent that he imagines himself to also be from outside of
Tims Creek. Three of them had parents who were returning to North Carolina: Nolan’s
mother is a doctor migrating back from San Francisco; Ted’s father is a lawyer moving
back from New York; and Ian’s father is returning home after retiring from the military.
Horace’s family does not approve of this group, however, because they believe
integration should be kept within school limits (63-64). As a result, Horace is forced to
abandon his group of friends.
Horace’s demise comes at the hands of his family during a Thanksgiving dinner.
This Thanksgiving scene has been of particular interest to critics because it is the only
point where the family alludes to Horace’s possible homosexuality. It is also the moment
in which his attempt at publicly expressing his identity is rejected. The Thanksgiving
before his suicide, Horace arrives late to dinner with a pierced ear, for which his GreatAunt Jonnie Mae and her three daughters, Rebecca, Rachel, and Ruthester chastise him.
Ironically, the piercing does not represent homosexuality or whiteness to Horace. For
him, it connected him to the “singular, infectious freedom” he saw in the boys as he
“identified with their sense of entitlement, believing the world owed him what it owed
them. Believing wholeheartedly he would receive it in the end” (237). With their
friendship, the boys bring Horace hope in a world outside of Tims Creek. His family,
however, views the boys as embodying homosexuality. What transpires at this dinner is
recounted three different times: first in the third-person narrative from his grandfather’s
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perspective, then in the form of a play in one of Jimmy’s confession sections, and finally
from Horace’s third-person narrative section.
The second rendition appears to be the most objective, as it recounts the dialogue
that occurs amongst the family members. The setup of this scene involves Zeke and
Jonnie Mae occupying the head chairs of the dining room table with Reverend Barden,
Jimmy, and Lester sitting between them while Rebecca, Rachel, and Ruthester bring
dishes to the table from the kitchen, and their husbands’ voices are heard coming from
the kitchen. This arrangement of characters in the family’s domestic space reflects the
power structure of the Cross family. Those who are not biological descendants of the
Crosses remain outside the familial community; an exception is made for the reverend
who was chosen by the Cross family to uphold their grandfather’s ideals in the church he
established. Additionally, the patriarchal structure that is adamantly upheld by the Cross
family is reflected in the table being occupied by the men of the family, regardless of
their generation, while the women serve the meal. The traditional gender roles are
disrupted by Jonnie Mae, the only woman sitting at the table, and ironically the one who
seeks to rigidly maintain the traditional roles. Jonnie Mae is represented as an equal to
her brother Zeke and of higher standing than her brother Jethro based on the portion of
her family’s land she owns. However, in fulfilling the role of the family’s patriarch, she is
presented as superior to Zeke. She creates her daughters in her own image, tells Zeke
how he should raise his grandson, Horace, and keeps her son, Lester, silenced.
To the family, Horace’s pierced ear aligns him directly against blackness and
heterosexuality, positioning him with whiteness and homosexuality. Jonnie Mae resents
this and accuses Horace of acting “Like some little girl. Like one of them perverts” (184).
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Littler claims that Jonnie Mae’s response to Horace’s earring reflects “the Cross family’s
civil rights struggle because to be gay is to fall on the side of whiteness, and whiteness is
what the Crosses have been fighting against all their lives” (44). While Jonnie Mae
ignores other religiously admonished acts, like Zeke’s adultery, she rigidly attacks sexual
behavior that deviates from tradition and traditional gender roles. For instance, Zeke
maintains his position in the family despite the possibility that he has children with
several women, while Jonnie Mae’s daughter Rose is outcast from the family after having
multiple babies with different men outside of marriage.
It is important to note that everyone in the immediate Cross family does not share
Jonnie Mae’s opinion of Horace. During this heated family discussion, the only sentences
Horace and Jimmy are able to complete are directed to Zeke, while Zeke is the only man
able to finish his sentences within the larger conversation. Lester makes four attempts to
defend Horace: “Well, I kind of like it, my—”; “Well, if you asked me—”; “It reminds
me of—”; “Well, I think…” (183-188). Lester is cut off midsentence by each one of his
sisters and then finally silenced by his mother. This scene points to the reason Jonnie Mae
passes over her son to groom her grandson for the position of Reverend. Lester’s openmindedness and willingness to accept Horace’s decisions threaten the static environment
Jonnie Mae seeks to keep in place. It also raises questions about Lester’s own sexuality,
since only he, Jimmy, and Horace do not think there is anything wrong with the piercing.
Jonnie Mae’s silencing of Lester keeps her from having to exile him from the family as
she does with other family members whose actions are too sexually radical.
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When Horace later reflects on this exchange, he views it as rejection from his
entire family. He does not remember Jimmy or Lester’s attempts to defend him, and more
importantly, he has no idea what his great-aunt was actually upset about:
He suspected his family might object to his action. But he
had no idea they would pronounce treason and declare war.
From top to bottom, uniformly, they condemned him [...]
Horace has no alternative but to retreat into a world of guilt
and confusion, not understanding the reasons for his exile.
(238-239)
The reason for his confusion is that his friendship with the four white boys alleviates his
anxiety from engaging in sexual activities, which suggest he has not been sexually active
since his summer in the theater company. He thoroughly internalizes the way his family
defines him and the way they would define him if he continues his homosexual
behaviors. It is this disorientation that leads him to his end. While he puts together the
ritual for his transformation, “In his mind he could see his Cousin Ann smiling her
cinnamon smile and hear her say in small, raspy voice: But don’t you know it yet,
Horace? You the Chosen Nigger” (13). Unlike Jimmy, Horace cannot accept his
designation as the chosen one in his family. Despite his attempts to the contrary, he
cannot give up his subjectivity to fulfill Jonnie Mae’s plans for him.
As previously noted, readers are not presented with a remorseful or devastated
community, but Zeke’s love for his grandson does have him questioning his interactions
with Horace. Zeke recalls that “Horace would sometimes ask me about Papa and I
couldn’t fit on nothing to say about him, except he was a big, strong, hardworking,
Christian man, who walked in the way of righteousness” (53). This idealized description
of Thomas Cross as the upstanding Christian works to further banish Horace from his
family as this heteronormalized image reminds Horace where Christianity places his
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conduct. Zeke then imagines a different way of doing things with Horace that might have
prevented his suicide. He thinks, “But now I reckon I’d tell him about them eyes of his
and the way he moved and the way I wanted to be just like him…then” (53). Zeke
idealizes his father, but fails to acknowledge how Thomas does not meet the requirements
enforced by Jonnie Mae and himself. The eyes he would now describe for Horace reflect
a very different side of the Cross family. As Zeke remembers it, Thomas’s eyes
were like a wild animal’s. Seemed like he could pull more
stuff out through his eyes than most folk do. He didn’t look
at you, he looked inside you, saw everything, and it was
casual for him. But you came away with the feeling that
you had no secrets from this man, cause he done looked
into the very place where you locked your stinkingest
secrets, and the bad thing was, you never knew if he
approved of what he saw, despised it, loved it…you just
never knew with that man. Never. And he could scare me
to death. You’d be doing something—chopping wood,
mending a fence, slopping hogs—and turn around and he’d
be there sitting and peering right into your mind, reading
your thoughts, like the devil or something…Once or twice I
remember I let out a holler, he scared me so. But he was
like that. Quiet as an Indian. Didn’t talk much, always
sneaking…well, really, there wont no sneak to it, it’s just
that he moved so quick and fast; you turn, he’d be there;
you blink, he’d be gone. (53)
Zeke’s actual memory of his father differs greatly from the image he relates to
Horace. Rather than remembering his father as the “Christian man, who walked in the
way of righteousness” (53), Zeke compares him to a wild animal and the devil. These
devil like qualities are accepted fondly by Zeke who even remembers imitating his
father’s behaviors. A very different type of Cross patriarch is depicted in this memory.
We are forced to wonder how Zeke and Jonnie Mae developed their strict enforcement of
tradition and religion from a man who is seemingly disinterested in controlling the
behavior of others. Unlike his children, Thomas does not outwardly police other people’s
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actions. Zeke is sure of his father’s ability to see the truth in everyone, but he ultimately
views his father’s lack of judgment as his unsettling flaw.
Much like Jimmy’s “what if” moment, Zeke wonders how he might have changed
Horace’s outcome by saying something different. Sharing this information about his own
father with Horace could have shown Horace that there was room for alternative,
powerful identities in Tims Creek. Zeke would have also had to allow Horace the space
for his own self-definition by releasing him from the burden of imagined identity his
family imposed upon him. As shown in Jimmy’s scene with the bootlegger’s wife, there
are community members, such as Thomas, who also reject the rigid guidelines for the
Tims Creek community. In addition to Jimmy’s interactions with this elderly woman and
Zeke’s memories of his father, Jimmy is also shown attempting to understand the
abnormal behaviors of his great-aunt Ruth who, though absent from the Thanksgiving
scene, represents a more accepting community already present in Tims Creek.
While Horace and Jimmy, as the main characters, have received the most
scholarly63 attention, their great-aunt Ruth is particularly interesting because of her
position outside of the family. Ruth’s intimacy with the family through her marriage to
Zeke and Jonnie Mae’s brother and her status as outsider to that family allow her the
distinctive viewpoint, a double-sight of sorts, to see through the eyes of the Cross family
and those of the larger Tims Creek community. Through these two viewpoints, she
develops a perspective that directly conflicts with that of Zeke and Jonnie Mae. The
exchanges that occur between Zeke and Ruth throughout the December 8th chapters
reveal a strained relationship that results from Ruth’s failure to accept the identity
assigned her by the Cross family.
63
All of the aforementioned scholars focus almost exclusively on Horace and Jimmy.
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The familial expectation placed upon Ruth was that she manage her husband who,
to Zeke and Jonnie Mae, does not live up to the Cross standard. His siblings sit back and
slowly collect his land as he continuously mismanages it. Jethro’s main vice is alcohol,
which Ruth cannot keep him from and which she and her eight children suffer from as
they do without food. In an argument between Ruth and Zeke the question of her husband
Jethro’s drinking problem is raised. Zeke tells Ruth, “‘I know that before you he never
touched a drop of liquor. He was a good man till he laid eyes on you’” (197). Zeke’s
accusation is grounded in his belief that Ruth’s disposition drove Jethro to alcoholism or
something more.
Ultimately Ruth fails to save Jethro from himself and her familial identity
positions her as a disagreeable woman who drove her husband to drinking. Ruth
responds, “‘Well, you’ll see yourself one day, Ezekiel Cross. See what you and your
family, your evil family have wrought. And it wont just on Jethro. It’s on Lester. It’s on
this boy here. It was on your grandboy. You all is something else’” (197). Ruth’s list does
not include Jimmy’s mother Rose who, as discussed earlier, is exiled from the family for
her having children outside of wedlock, nor does it include Horace’s womanizing father
Sammy, who likewise is ostracized from the family for his actions. Wester suggests that
the Crosses have a history of repressed homosexuality in their family64. That Ruth aligns
Jethro and Lester with Jimmy and Horace whose commonality is neither alcoholism nor
ostracism suggests that she understands what the Crosses actually seek to repress.
64
Other critics have considered the reasons other Crosses are exiled from the family and leave the
community, but they do not go as far as Wester in suggesting that those other than Jimmy and Horace
might also be struggling with homosexuality. While other the other characters’ sexuality is not discussed or
presented with the same detail as Horace and Jimmy’s, it is certainly plausible that the same type of silence
exists towards other members of the Cross family for similar reasons.
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Although Ruth does not name homosexuality nor term the “evil” “wrought” by
the Crosses as homophobia, she refuses to remain quiet about the silence that exists
around the men’s experiences and behaviors. Trudier Harris notes that “it is not quite
clear that [Ruth] understands the true nature of Horace’s demise” (Scary 124) since she
does not name it. Yet, a conversation Ruth remembers between her husband and herself
suggests that Ruth knows alcohol is not Jethro’s actual problem. After finding Jethro on
the front porch crying, Ruth prods him until he finally attempts to explain his tears:
—I didn’t want you to live in such a bad way. I don’t
deserve you. You…you don’t deserve me. I ain’t worthy of
you, Ruth. And I don’t know what to do about it. I just
don’t. I try to do better. I sure do…but I fall. I’m weak.
And look at you. Look at you.
—You…we’ll just have to keep trying hard. That’s all.
Just keep on. Just keep on and don’t quit—
—You a good woman, but you don’t understand, do you?
You don’t understand. (135)
Jethro’s protest at the end of their conversation suggests that he thinks Ruth is reassuring
him about his alcohol problem, when he is really talking about something else. He is
adamant that she does not understand that he is not talking about his alcoholism, but
perhaps the reason for it. As she remembers this conversation, however, Ruth follows it
with the thoughts, “Oh, but I did. I did” (135). Ruth tries to help Jethro survive his
family, but she is blamed for his self-destruction instead.
Externally, Ruth acts like a disagreeable woman when she is with the Cross
family. Her actions, during her visit to their cousin Asa in the hospital, confirm every
opinion Zeke has about her. It is during this trip that Jimmy realizes Ruth does not
actually meet the identity assigned to her. On the way home from the hospital, instead of
delivering the behaviors Jimmy expects of her, Ruth shows a different side to her self.
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After vehemently stating, “‘I ain’t no Cross, damn it. I’m a Davis. That’s what I was
born, you old fool’” (198), Ruth visibly rejects her Cross identity and, presumably,
performs a Davis one which involves her interaction with a changing future, via her
interest in technology through the Pac-man arcade game, and her relationship with the
young white girl playing the game. For the Crosses, both actions go against the ideals
they have spent their generations upholding: racial segregation for their wellbeing and
devotion to a traditional way of life.
Jimmy does not understand that Jonnie Mae and Zeke’s model is not the only
belief system functioning in their older generation. When Ruth sees the young girl
playing the arcade game, “Jimmy was sure she was about to be vexed and demand the
child quit keeping that fuss, but her face was placid, and her voice did not seem in any
way annoyed. If anything, she was curious” (203). Ruth’s interest in the Pac-man game, a
machine she has not seen before, offers Jimmy a glimpse into how the community might
act towards the future. Rather than allow for this realization, he can only respond with
confusion: “Jimmy could not figure the unusual look on his great-aunt’s face. He took
note of the girl, who kept turning around and smiling at Ruth, and Ruth smiling back, and
he kept wondering what he was missing” (204). Ruth’s cordial behavior to the white
woman at the mechanic’s shop and her encouragement towards the young white girl
surprises Jimmy; he views her as like the other Crosses. Ruth does not keep her distance
from these white people as Jimmy expects of her. Ruth defies his knowledge of her even
further when “The girl clutched Ruth’s other hand and Ruth rose to her crooked position,
and in her crooked fashion made her way, much to Jimmy’s dumbfounded disbelief, to
the video game” (204). Jimmy’s ignorance and misunderstanding of his own 93-year-old
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aunt raise the question of how well he knows his community or even his family. This
scene suggests that changing the Tims Creek community’s, or even his family’s, beliefs
might not be as hard as Jimmy imagines if he recognizes the voices and actions of all
those who, like himself, have been silenced.
Ruth’s behaviors, which appear inexplicable to Jimmy, draw attention to Kenan’s
complex representation of community in A Visitation. For much of the novel, the
perspectives presented as belonging to the community are actually the beliefs of the
Cross family, specifically Jonnie Mae and Zeke Cross. Kenan suggests that the
destructive force keeping the community in its static state is the Cross family’s power
over the community members as the family tries to over determine individual selfdefinition. Such small changes as the decreased number of hogkillings, opening the
novel, or group tobacco harvests, closing the novel, suggests, however, that change is
occurring definitively outside the family’s control. The Tims Creek community that
exists beyond the Cross family is actually ready for and awaiting a more organized
change. Horace’s death is, therefore, not necessary to change the community’s behavior
and it seems ineffectual at altering the Cross’s behaviors. Here the family functions as the
pernicious force while the community could have offered acceptance.
The opposite model, in which the community is harmful and the family is
protective is presented in Ansa’s second novel, following her debut Baby of the Family
(1989), Ugly Ways. The novel focuses polyvocally on the struggles of the three Lovejoy
daughters as they come together to bury their mother. The sisters all have conflicted
relationships with their mother because, to them, she fails to fulfill the role of nurturing
mother that they desire their entire lives. The oldest daughter, Betty, has remained in their
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hometown of Mulberry, Georgia, while her younger sisters Emily and Annie Ruth reside
in Atlanta and Los Angeles. Like characters in other migration novels, Emily and Annie
Ruth struggle mentally and emotionally as they attempt to live in these urban
environments that represent the North. The novel’s over arching theme is the mental and
emotional stability of the Lovejoy family. While all three sisters have versions of
psychological breakdowns, Betty’s is the mildest because she remains in the small
southern hometown and has neither the time nor space to fall apart. As in Kenan’s novel,
the family dynamic and the familial expectations play a large role in these women’s
vexed understanding of their identities. The Lovejoy sisters’ tight bond in the face of
their mother’s alleged insanity and the community’s judgment of her, however, make
their familial space as supportive as it is devastating. It is Mulberry community’s
judgment projected onto and reflected in the sisters with which they attempt to cope. It is
ironic that the sisters do not all together recognize the community’s role in their struggles
with their identities, but instead place the blame solely on their mother. Mulberry
community’s gossip sets behavioral expectations for the women even when they are still
young children, and it is those suppositions that alter the way the sisters perceive their
selves as adults.
It is unfortunate that published scholarship has not given Ugly Ways the extent of
attention it deserves. Only a few critical responses have been written about Ugly Ways.
Several of the critical reviews either focus on the domestic violence occurring between
the parents, Ernest and Esther “Mudear” Lovejoy, and/or blame Mudear for the situations
in which her daughters find themselves. A reviewer more forgiving of Mudear, Tara
Green argues, “Mudear has both embraced motherhood by teaching her daughters what
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she feels they need to know to be independent women and denied it by withholding
emotional nurturing from them” (50). Green does not view Mudear’s withholding of
emotional nurturing as a failure in her role as mother because “she feels that showing her
love for them may be detrimental to their success as independent women” (50). The
villainization of Mudear by the Lovejoy daughters, the Mulberry community, and other
scholars results from gendered expectations that Mudear refuses to participate in any
longer. Barbara Bennett, for example, suggests that if the roles were reversed and Ernest
was the one to withdraw emotionally and physically, “most readers would be more
accepting […] What is so shocking is that the one rejecting home and family is the
mother” (193). Mudear views her rejection of subordination as a wife and selflessness as
a mother to be a tough-love model that will teach her daughters to be their own women in
a white, male dominated and still racist society65. Her daughters’ individual successes as
independent career women prove that they have benefited from her lesson, but their
desires for marriage and general acceptance from their communities show that they do
not understand the reasons behind it.
As the oldest child, Betty is the only Lovejoy daughter to remember Mudear as
the pristine, submissive homemaker and Ernest as the verbally and physically abusive
provider. Betty divides her life into two parts: before Mudear’s change and after
Mudear’s change. She also reconstructs for her younger sisters memories of the first part
that they were too young to remember. Mudear’s change makes the Lovejoy family, for
decades, the center of town gossip. Initially the gossip is targeted at Mudear, “Nearly
65
The theme of tough-love and tough-mothering is present at various levels in many African American
novels that portray parent-child relationships. It is visible, for instance, with Nanny in Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937), Eva in Morrison’s Sula (1973), Sethe in Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and with
Nellie in Ansa’s Baby of the Family.
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everyone over the age of forty in Mulberry claimed they knew the date that they said
Mudear lost her mind” (10). Mudear never explains to her daughters the circumstances
surrounding her change, so they assume she went crazy, as the Mulberry community
claims. Through Mudear’s reflections, it becomes clear that Mudear neither goes crazy
nor has a psychological breakdown, as her daughters do. She presents herself as making a
conscious decision to take back her life for her own purposes rather than surrender it for
others’ benefit. In contrast to Walker’s Meridian who rejects her role as a traditional
mother to sacrifice herself for the welfare of the black community during the Civil Rights
Movement or Avey who willingly assumes the role of black youth mentor, Mudear
rejects her station as wife and mother to reclaim her self from all external demands. Her
daughters view this action negatively. They see themselves as part of what Mudear
rejects, as Emily tells her psychiatrist, “Mudear made selfishness into a religion” (Ansa
115).
The Mulberry community is first introduced in Baby of the Family and developed
further in Ansa’s third novel The Hand I Fan With (1996). The Hand reflects a similar
motherly relationship between its protagonist Lena McPherson, and the Mulberry
community as Walker depicts in Meridian. Lena does not, however, have a distinctive
moment where she realizes her community does not need her to mother its members.
Instead, in her early forties, Lena begins to put her happiness first and essentially
abandons the Mulberry community. As a result, the community is forced to learn how to
care for and depend upon itself, and it begins casting judgment on Lena’s eccentricities
once the community can no longer take advantage of her kindness. Lena is initially
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protected from the vehement gossip the Lovejoy sisters face, but she forfeits this when,
like Mudear, she distances herself from the community.
As mentioned earlier, Ansa shares the narration of Ugly Ways among the
perspectives of the five Lovejoy’s. The third-person omniscient consciousness narrates
each chapter from the point of view of Betty, Emily, Annie Ruth, or Ernest. Every few
chapters, however, readers receive intrusive posthumous, first-person narration from
Mudear as she reflects on, responds to, and relativizes the conversations her family has
just had about her. Green claims it is important that “We learn about Mudear from
Mudear” because “She makes it clear that they do not know her; they only have a
perception of her” (46). Drawn into the story’s postmodern ambiguities, readers can have
sympathy towards the sisters for feeling unloved or abandoned by Mudear, but at the
same time be confused by an equally proud and critical mother as she mediates on her
involvement in the important moments of her daughters’ lives. Additionally, Mudear’s
first-person, interruptive narration amongst the third-person narration of her family is
significant in that it reflects her very clear and stable sense of self that allows her to
directly express herself to readers without the filter of third-person narration66. Although
Mudear is annoyed at times that her daughters do not understand her motives, she
watches them work through an understanding of her actions without their realizing it.
66
In his recent study Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature (2013), Brian
Norman claims, “Dead women tend to talk in American literature when their experiences of death can also
address an issue of injustice that their communities might prematurely consign to the past” (1). Although
her does not address Ansa’s Ugly Ways, Mudear would fall somewhere in between his treatment of William
Faulkner’s Addie Bundren and Randall Kenan’s dead channeled through young Clarence in “Clarence and
the Dead.” She desires autonomy, yet she remains immersed in her daughters’ secrets and gossip.
Additionally, Ansa’s use of the supernatural with Mudear watching her daughters after her death parallels
Marshall’s Aunt Cuney attempting to communicate in Avey’s dreams. Their spirits bridge the lived
knowledge and experience of the past and present.
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Mudear views her approach to childrearing as productively constructing the space
for her daughters to establish their individual identities free from the constraints she faced
herself. In her first chapter Mudear explains,
Taught them how to carry themselves. How to keep that part of
themselves to themselves so that nobody could take it and walk on it. Tried
my best to make them free. As free as I could teach them to be and still be
free myself.
How many times did I tell Emily, my middle girl, to pull up that chin, tie
up that chin. Look to the stars, I would tell them look to the stars. Don’t let
the whole town see you walking with your heads down, like you got
something to be ashamed of.
Lord knows this damn little-assed town did try to make them think that.
That they had something to be ashamed of. Me mostly. Umph. It’s funny
really. The one thing in life that they could always look to with pride, a
mother who set an example of being her own woman, was the one thing
that everyone wanted them to be ashamed of. (34)
Mudear’s education to her daughters is about self-definition. Mudear wants her daughters
to be their own women. She focuses on her daughters’ individualities, completely
discarding their community-defined identities. She believes that through her own
example the community’s criticisms of her do not influence her daughters, but she is
incorrect. Despite her efforts to raise her daughters to be independent women—which
they are—the stigmatizing identities ascribed to the women by the larger Mulberry
community disrupt their abilities to value Mudear’s message.
The main difficulty the community and her daughters have with Mudear’s change
is her failure to articulate it to anyone. She does not view her actions as a rejection of
motherhood, but rather as an effort to actively redefine her mothering so it is compatible
with her new vision of herself and life. Mudear initially has an idealized view of marriage
as a partnership. When this ideal is destroyed, she patiently waits for the right moment to
escape. That opportunity comes when Ernest is unable to pay all the bills one winter after
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loaning Mudear’s northern relatives a substantial sum of money, against her advice, and
unexpected medical bills for their three sick children. Mudear steps in with money she
has saved and turns the gas and electricity back on. In this moment, when Ernest realizes
his error and she steps in to provide financially for the family, Mudear gains the upper
hand and decides to no longer perform the expected roles of homemaker, wife, or mother.
Mudear recounts “I decided to stay in body. But to leave in spirit and let my spirit free. So
that’s what I did. And never did regret it, either” (106). This decision mirrors that of Jay
Johnson and Avey’s great-great grandmother in Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow
when the two make a similar choice to stay in body but leave in mind. Mudear’s
execution of this resolution, however, takes a very different form, beginning with her
refusal to allow her body to continue performing required tasks.
What the community deems crazy is actually Mudear claiming her freedom by
rejecting socially prescribed gender roles. Mudear’s change is difficult for the community
to accept because her refusal to leave her home results also in and means her planned
refusal to participate in the community. Betty reflects that the new house her father builds
to meet Mudear’s expectations separates them from the community: “Mudear grew a
buffer around this house. The plants and the trees and flowers set [them] off from this
whole neighborhood” (217). While Mudear cultivates her plant barrier nightly and enjoys
the seclusion, the community, like her daughters, works to understand further this selfinterested distancing, thus encouraging the gossip about her. Page argues that
contemporary black writers create intersubjective webs that are reflective of “the belief in
West African cultures that individual fulfillment only occurs through harmony with the
community and the cosmos” (26). As such Mudear’s rejection of the community can be
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read as having cosmic implications. Although it disrupts the sense of harmony for the
community and her daughters, it does not prevent her individual fulfillment. Mudear, like
Ansa’s Lena and Morrison’s Sula, follows the Hurston model of black women rejecting
self-sacrificing roles in order to nurture their process of self-definition. Unlike Lena,
Sula, and Janie, however, Mudear is not childless when she makes her decision to reclaim
her life from her oppressive marriage, which results in individual fulfillment that is at
greater odds with the Mulberry community. Page adds that “The individual could not
thrive, indeed, could not exist, in isolation from the infinitely interwoven relationships
with other members of the community and with the community as a whole” (26). Mudear
shows this is not necessarily the case. She does not participate in any local communities,
but her love of television, especially catalogues and home shopping networks, connects
her to a different kind of community.
While it is not the same type of community Page references, her daily FedEx and
UPS deliveries make it an interactive community from which she receives physical items.
Ernest recalls Mudear’s awareness of this connection with others: “She had said many
times how those two conveniences had been tailor-made for a person like her. Like there
were other Mudears scattered all over the country, as if she weren’t one of a kind” (162).
This reflection reveals that after thirty years Ernest does not believe Mudear’s actions are
normal, in the sense that there are other people who have chosen to live life in a similar
manner. This alternative community, however, also remains physically distanced from
Mudear, as does the Mulberry community. Even though she is living a self-indulgent life,
she does not join the community of frivolous shoppers who buy items just to buy them.
Ernest notes that “she didn’t waste no money on those little china dogs and doodads that
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they sold on TV. She went for the good stuff. Equipment and stuff for her garden, light
bulbs that were guaranteed to burn for a hundred years, and a speed video rewinder”
(101). All of these purchases project the life that she has designed for herself in which
she sleeps all day, gets up at night to watch TV and movies, and to garden outside. Her
distant community of at-home shoppers supports her freedom through their anonymity
that allows them to require nothing from her.
While Mudear receives all she believes she needs to be whole, the community
takes out its uncertainties and frustrations with her actions on the family members they
have easier access to. This eventually develops into gossip about the entire family since
all the members have to change to support Mudear’s new lifestyle: “Some said the whole
family had ‘walking insanity’ like other folks had ‘walking pneumonia.’ They still went
about their daily routines, but as far as people in Mulberry were concerned all the
Lovejoys were walking-, talking-, working-, shopping-crazy” (11). Unlike the Bottom
community’s accommodation of Shadrack and Sula’s aberrances, the Mulberry
community is unable to make room for Mudear’s new vision of self. They make Mudear,
and by extension her whole family, the continued subject of gossip and speculation. The
label “crazy” becomes the false community-defined identity undeservedly ascribed to
difference, in this case to the Lovejoy sisters Betty, Emily, and Annie Ruth. This endless
gossip positions the community as a complicating if not hindering force in the Lovejoy
daughters’ formation of their identities. The sisters scrutinize any of Mudear’s actions
that, to them, result in making them different from everyone else. Each moment the
sisters confirm any such action, the more deeply the community-defined identity indents
their psyches.
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Mudear believes she has offered her daughters a model for effectively dealing
with community rumors. Her daughters find it difficult, however, to understand her
indifference to the gossip: “the thing that amazed Betty was when she discovered that
Mudear had somehow heard all these rumors, probably from her friend Carrie, and that
none of them disturbed the self-contained woman. She even laughed at some of the
rumors. Since the change, Mudear didn’t give a damn what people thought of her” (61).
The bigger issue is that the sisters cannot learn from this model as Mudear hopes they
would, much like Kenan’s Jonnie Mae, Mudear attempts to define her daughters’
identities for them, not realizing they are different individuals. They remain susceptible to
community gossip relative to their own identities and to Mudear’s state of mind. Their
treatment of Mudear reflects the community’s treatment of them. Rather than insisting
that the community stop abusing them, they want Mudear to stop being different and
indifferent. Even as an adult, “It made Betty mad that Mudear’s actions had left her and
her sisters so vulnerable, so defenseless, open and raw to the town’s gossip. Always had”
(11).
The main shortcoming with Mudear’s childrearing, in her daughters’ opinion, is
that she was not nurturing. Green argues that Mudear’s garden allows her to “displace her
nurturing instincts by cultivating her fruits and vegetables” (50). This suggestion that
Mudear still desires to nurture appears on more than one occasion in the actions she takes
to protect her children from the community when she feels clear damage might be done
to them. She shields Annie Ruth and Betty from the home community around the time of
their emotional breakdowns and she also empowers Emily to claim her happiness in her
Atlanta work community, although none of these actions are done delicately or
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affectionately. She steps in when she thinks the situations will do damage to their status
as independent women.
Following the news of Annie Ruth’s public breakdown in Washington D.C. and
time at a recovery facility, Mudear takes action to protect her youngest daughter. Without
leaving her home, “Mudear went right to work. Over the phone she told Carrie, the one
woman she still talked with in town and who still talked with her, ‘Cut, my baby done
gone and had a heart attack. Working in that fast-paced northern city, all that stress and
overtime and all that. You know, Carrie, all my girls are working women” (13). It is
paradoxical that Mudear’s one remaining connection to the Mulberry community is also
the community’s best gossip. A calculating woman, Mudear strategically places the
information with Carrie because she knows it will spread quickly in the community, just
like “The word of Annie Ruth’s breakdown spread quickly in Mulberry” (13). Mudear
does not care if the community calls her “crazy” because she knows she is sane.
However, when Annie Ruth actually has a mental breakdown, Mudear improvises: she
changes the story to a heart attack so Annie Ruth is not viewed as vulnerable with a
“weak sounding” (14) mental health issue. Since Mudear spends so much time making
her daughters tough so that they will not be mistreated or taken advantage of, she cannot
concede to Annie Ruth’s breakdown. She asks, “‘What she got to break down about?’”
(14). At the most basic level, Mudear sees Annie Ruth as a successful independent
woman without a man there to drag her down or give her something to break down about.
For Annie Ruth, however, this breakdown confirms her community-defined identity as
crazy.
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It is not explicitly stated why Annie Ruth has a breakdown while living in
Washington D.C., but not long after checking out of the rehabilitation center, she takes a
new job in Los Angeles. She eventually has a breakdown in Los Angeles as well. Only
this time we are offered more reflections on the breakdown, which point to her inability
to cope with city life. The narrator first identifies the features specific to Hollywood, “the
shallowness, the hunger for fame and stardom that left Annie Ruth so empty in L.A.”
(144). This emptiness, presented as being specific to Hollywood, is not Annie Ruth’s
main problem with the city. The larger issues that Annie Ruth struggles with even more
are both material and particular to all big cities:
The rows of convertible Jaguars and Mercedes with their
cellular phones parked next to a homeless family’s raggedy
Ford. The danger from random violence in the street that
everyone tried to pretend they didn’t understand. Having to
go all the way across town to see more than three black
people laughing and talking together. (145)
Notwithstanding the class differences in Mulberry, Annie Ruth’s southern home
community, Ansa depicts it across all her novels as a community that takes care of all of
its members. Its gossip maybe difficult for the Lovejoy sisters to endure, but the
Mulberry community does not ignore its problems as is the case in Los Angeles.
The sisters’ own childhood experiences of their father kicking them all out of the
house on numerous occasions before Mudear’s change has a lasting impact on them. In
finding shelter with others, however, the rough moments also show them that there is
always someone to take in, to embrace, the less fortunate. Homelessness is insinuated as
a particularly urban problem, one that Emily shows to be highly disturbing within the
parameters of Mulberry. After happening upon a cardboard shelter by the river in
Mulberry, Emily, at “the thought of a homeless person in the tiny town of Mulberry […,
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leaves] her lined leather gloves there with a twenty-dollar bill tucked inside” (68). The
only conclusion Emily can draw to explain the phenomenon is that it is not occupied by a
member of Mulberry’s community, but that it is her ex-husband seeking shelter from
Atlanta as he treats the mental stress of his time in Vietnam with a drug addiction. On her
drive home, “All the way back to Atlanta, [Emily] had kept saying to herself, A homeless
person in Mulberry. A homeless person in Mulberry” (68). It is both her concern for her
ex-husband and her inability to accept urban problems in her tiny hometown that cause
Emily’s state of disbelief. This cardboard shelter does not remain at the river and its
occupant is never confirmed, but it is an extremely uncommon occurrence in their
hometown.
The stress of the urban environment is too much for Annie Ruth to deal with
partly because she is alone, without female friendship, and partially because her distress
over race and class divisions in the city is not taken seriously. Since the community
deems her to be crazy, it does not come across as a legitimate response when “She had
had to stop going to parties in the Hollywood Hills because looking down on the smogchoked city below and all the unfortunates who could not afford to breath unpolluted air
made her so melancholy that she would have to find a quite spot on a deck and weep”
(145). Annie Ruth is unable to take her experience of melancholy and weeping over class
divisions seriously because, to the community, she is overreacting. Her individual
identity is the only of the sisters’ not to be referenced, which suggests that she has been
unable to survive and transcend the community’s image of her.
Despite her unhappiness in urban cities, Annie Ruth will not return to Mulberry.
Annie Ruth’s refusal to move back to the South is acknowledged as an attempt to “put
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some space between herself and Mudear” (218). Of all the sisters, she puts the most space
between herself and Mudear, which leaves her desiring the South. After proclaiming,
“God, I miss the South.” Annie Ruth rubbed her hand over
the Velvety moss growing on the outside of a huge
strawberry pot and smelled her palm. She sounded as if she
might cry as she touched the tongue of a frog set among a
bed of frilly ferns with the toe of her boot and came back to
the swing and sat down. (218)
Annie Ruth’s acknowledgement of her longing for the South occurs in Mudear’s garden.
Although the displacing garden has previously been a point of jealousy with the sisters
because it receives all of Mudear’s attention, this garden represents a very specific type
of rural which Annie Ruth associates with the South. Annie Ruth does not, however, miss
the Mulberry community, at least not on a personal level. She harbors nostalgia for a
specific ideal of the South, which her Malibu beach house cannot provide. This scene
also invokes Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of our Mother’s Gardens” where the garden
connects Annie Ruth to her mother’s creative expression. Unlike the mothers discussed
by Walker, however, Mudear has the time and resources to direct her creativity in any
number of directions. Annie Ruth’s experience in her mother’s garden is a bittersweet
one as she both desires and resents the space that held her mother’s attention and
nurturance.
Like Annie Ruth, Emily consciously stays away from Mudear, seeing her as the
destructive force, not the community. Emily does not move as far away as Annie Ruth,
but she is also unable to accept the city of Atlanta as her home. She makes minimum of
one trip to Mulberry every week to get her hair done at her sister’s shop, though normally
more than that, but “she never even considered moving back to her hometown. Not as
long as Mudear was living there, and it was hard to think of Mulberry without Mudear.
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And it was impossible for her to think of Mudear not living. She was grateful for the
protection the hundred and fifty or so miles to Atlanta gave her” (72). She sees the
distance as offering her protection, however, Emily works against it by visiting Mudear
every week. Her isolation in Atlanta, along with the rate at which gossip about her travels
back to Mulberry, makes her decision not to move back less clear than Annie Ruth’s.
Emily also desires to return to Mulberry for the communality it offers. Even
though this community has not been particularly supportive of Emily, she has an
attachment to her place within or near it:
Although she felt the town hadn’t been kind to her, with its
gossip and harsh judgments, Emily still loved Mulberry
like an old friend. Other than her sisters, she felt her
hometown was all she had. The only thing that anchored
her to the world was her identity in Mulberry, even if it was
as “the craziest Lovejoy sister.” (69)
Emily desires a clear connection to the world because she constantly lingers on the edge
of suicide. Additionally, the only identity she is able to recognize is her community
image of her as “the craziest Lovejoy sister.” Even though she willingly accepts that
identity, she would rather be included on “party lists and invitations” (70) which would
actually make her feel like a part of the Mulberry community. Either way, she forgives
the community and accepts the identity that maintains a place for her to belong.
Emily is more conflicted about Mudear’s failure as a mother than are her sisters.
She remains confused about some of Mudear’s ambiguous actions that would qualify her
as a caring mother. In a moment of defending Mudear, she recounts to her sisters a
specific exchange between herself and Mudear. When Emily shows up in her parents’
drive at 4:00 am, Mudear is awake and outside gardening as usual. As she sits in her car
crying about ongoing sexual harassment at work, Mudear approaches. Emily reflects,
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“She was looking at me like I was one of her flowers that wasn’t doing too well and she
was wondering whether she should cut back on water, fertilize me, or snip my head off”
(233). Emily’s comparison of herself to one of Mudear’s flowers places Mudear
momentarily in the role of nurturer, but Emily also notices Mudear fight the urge to be
that nurturing mother: “She reached out to me for a minute, just a minute, I thought she
was actually gonna wipe my tears away. But she didn’t. She reached up in my hair and
picked something out” (234). Ultimately Mudear solves Emily’s problem through a series
of practical questions to determine how much Emily wants the job. Mudear tells her
“‘don’t you let nobody steal your joy’” (234). This simple advice serves as permission for
Emily to confront her harasser and claim her position at the office.
Emily also has a very public breakdown, but hers is not as compact as Annie
Ruth’s. Emily’s most crucial moment for her community-defined identity is connected to
her insomnia and a series of incidents that, to Mulberry, prove her insanity. Following
Annie Ruth’s mental collapse and her own abortion and divorce, Emily
drove around her neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta at
various hours of the day and night, looking for all the world
like a wolf clutching the steering wheel of her red Datsun,
her eyes darting dangerously here and there, always in
search of something. Atlanta was not so far away. The
stories got back to Mulberry. (13)
Throughout the novel, Emily is presented as being the most comfortable behind the wheel
of a car. It is where she fits and she finds purpose by driving her sisters where they need
to go. This scene that gets reported back to the Mulberry community reflects Emily’s
search for the things, such as happiness and belonging, she feels missing from her life.
Her actions behind the wheel of her car also resemble her search for her self. This search
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takes many forms such as weekly meetings with her psychologist and with a psychic, and
continued effort toward self-discovery.
Prior to receiving Mudear’s permission to claim and insist on her joy, Emily
cannot fight the sexual harassment at the office because she has been sexually involved
with almost everyone in the office. The identity she is given by her work community
reflects her promiscuity, but she is not willing to have sex with just anyone. In Emily’s
opinion, “white men have gotten all the black pussy they gon’ ever get in this country”
(233). This is a small piece of her individual identity, but she is unable to assert it beyond
avoiding her boss’ advances. Mudear’s continuous lesson to her daughters is to not let
anyone define them or dictate their actions. However, Mudear is not there every time
Emily is stereotyped, offering Emily authorization to reject misnaming. Emily is
described as
the family chameleon, changing with what was expected of
her. She tried so hard to be whatever she was asked of her
that she routinely lost track of what she felt was the real
Emily. Betty felt this was why her sister acted so crazy
sometimes, it was what people expected of her. And her
older sister had to routinely tell her, “Okay, Em-Em, come
on now, come on back now.” (223-224)
Although it implies a lack of connection on Emily’s part, her attribute as chameleon
suggests fluidity to her identity. This ability to be anything, however, dislodges her true
self or the “real” Emily. She does not actually know who the real Emily is because she is
also submerged in negative community expectations and the portrait of her as crazy.
Betty recognizes that Emily is living up to her this communal typecasting of her as is
Annie Ruth.
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Considering that Betty never leaves Mulberry, she remains immersed in the
community and its gossip about the Lovejoy family. Betty’s profession also gives her
prime access to all of the town’s gossip. She is able to a priori see the gossip forming
when community members witness her and Emily picking up a disheveled Annie Ruth
from the airport. After Annie Ruth has an anxiety attack on the plane, “Betty could
already see the tongues wagging. She had always made her living working in beauty
shops—the hotbeds of gossip—and she knew from experience that Mulberry had not
stopped discussing and dissecting the Lovejoy family since the day Mudear changed”
(10). Since the events are already beyond Betty’s control, she collects her sister and the
luggage as discretely as possible and gets them to the car, beyond the community’s reach.
Despite her attempts to keep them out of the public eye, their lives are never so private
that the inquisitive and meddling community will not find its way in.
As a child, Betty develops a distaste for gossip when she overhears a
conversation about her family at the grocery store. The women speculate that “Esther
probably getting her ass whipped in that house, too. That man only allow the girls to
leave for school and errands. Yeah, Esther a captive in that house” (61). This gossip blurs
Betty’s experiences from before and after Mudear’s change, which is the most frustrating
aspect of the situation for Betty. The two women position Esther and her daughters as the
victims to Ernest’s tyranny. There was a time when Ernest was that type of man. After
Mudear’s change, it is Mudear the family views as the tyrant. Mudear is not physically
but verbally abusive: her words and inaction succeed in tearing her husband down and
upsetting her daughters. The lesson Betty consciously learns from this encounter is to
never talk about anyone in public “without looking over her shoulder first to make sure
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somebody’s relative or friend wasn’t listening nearby” (61). Ansa suggests that she
should have learned that the gossip moving through the community about her mother was
not true. As such, she should know enough to view and ignore the gossip that began
including her and her sisters.
Betty’s nervous breakdown is much more subtle than her sisters’, but living in the
community keeps her from having a more visible breakdown. Her anxiety manifests as a
nervous itching that she is able to keep discrete. When she finally lets herself go, Mudear
is there and tells her to “‘Save the crazy shit for your own time, now get up off that floor
and go on to that cosmetology seminar, like you got some sense’” (14).Once again an
apathetic Mudear rejects the role of nurturer and offers, instead, practical advice to keep
Betty’s career moving forward. Mudear’s command brings Betty out of her momentary
breakdown and the town does not get to partake in it as gossip. Mudear’s interjection
prevents Betty from proving her self crazy to the community as do the other sisters. This
is more important for Betty than for her sisters, because she is the most obsessed with the
community’s opinion of her.
Leading up to the final scene from the sisters’ third-person perspective, Betty and
Emily remain controlled by Mulberry’s insinuations about them as Annie Ruth desires to
heal some of her childhood pain by confronting her mother’s corpse. Upon making her
intentions known that she is heading down to the funeral parlor to talk to Mudear’s
corpse, the three sisters have a heated argument:
“For God’s sake, Annie Ruth, don’t be going out of this
house shaming us in the street,” Betty said, catching her
sister by the arm in the kitchen and pulling her back into
the hall.
Annie Ruth snatched her arm away.
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“Betty, you the smartest one of us. Don’t you get it? We
ain’t never done nothing to shame us in this town. Hell, we
ought to be proud we still alive and just slightly crazy.”
(emphasis original 257)
Unlike her sisters’, Annie Ruth’s desire for the South is less about community connection
and acceptance and more about the physical and cultural space it provides. While Betty
and Emily are driven by what Annie Ruth’s actions will mean for their positions to the
community, Annie Ruth shocks them with the revelation that they have “never done
nothing to shame” themselves and that they should be proud of their slight craziness.
Betty and Emily believe this statement to be true, at least the first half, but they remain
unwilling to perform their perceived craziness for the community’s enjoyment.
After following Annie Ruth to the funeral parlor, which had a service in progress
in one of the other chapels, the three sisters enact what is perhaps the novel’s most
tragicomic moment. According to the narrator, “Betty and Emily burst in the chapel door
like henchmen. But they stopped to turn and close the door behind them so no one could
see and hear what was going on” (264). Their attempt to hide Annie Ruth’s confrontation
of Mudear from the community fails. The three women are heard and then discovered by
the others at the funeral parlor in a tangled mess with their mother’s corpse on the floor
of the empty chapel. In their attempt to conceal the situation, they end up making it more
visible as they first fight with one another before turning on Mudear. Betty and Emily
resist Annie Ruth’s plan to confront Mudear for their suffering in life, but all three
women eventually join in this attempt to address their unresolved feelings. Mudear
recognizes these events as only one part of the process of self-definition. She responds,
again posthumously, “Humph, those girls don’t know me at all. Or themselves! Now they
think they free women ’cause they think they got me told. Humph, getting mad is just the
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first step” (276). For the Lovejoy sisters, getting mad and finally voicing their frustrations
clear the space for them to come to terms with their community-defined identities and
begin their self-definition.
The appearance of more community members than expected at Mudear’s funeral
reinforces the Lovejoys’ position as the center of town gossip. Mudear exhibits her selfinvolved mindset when she assumes the crowd of “ninety-five, a hundred people” (274)
at her funeral have come out to “see a show. Bet they thought it was gonna be an open
casket” (275). Based on the events of the previous day, however, the show the Mulberry
community has come to see is round two of the Lovejoy sisters acting crazy, but the
sisters are surprisingly composed and dignified. Mudear observes, “Ain’t got to say one
time to any of ’em to pull up their chins and look to the stars today. Lots of women
woulda been to ashamed after the way they behaved yesterday in this funeral home to
show their faces around here” (275). The Lovejoy sisters seem to have learned Mudear’s
lessons for surviving the community at last and no longer need her reminders. Their
appearance at Mudear’s funeral with their heads held high reaffirms Annie Ruth’s
proclamation, “We ain’t never done nothing to shame us in this town” (257).
In Taking After Mudear (2007), Ansa’s sequel to Ugly Ways, Annie Ruth and
Emily make their returns to Mulberry permanent. As Mudear claims “getting mad is just
the first step.” The Lovejoy sisters take the next step towards their freedom by accepting
their place in their home community and create a space for their own self-determination.
As the sisters allow themselves to accept pieces of life they had once denied themselves,
they move towards their whole selves. Annie Ruth finds her personal identity in
motherhood. Betty no longer fears the community’s judgment as she makes public her
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relationship with Cinque, who is twenty-three years younger than she, and also considers
the possibilities of their future together. Emily is finally able to articulate her feelings and
opinions, and no longer functions as the chameleon to meet others’ expectations of her.
The Lovejoy sisters are finally able to forge their lives, having moved beyond the
judgment of the Mulberry community and their own fears perpetuated by the town’s
gossip.
***
As the foregoing discussion illustrates, the conflicted representations of
community in African American return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era
address the role that those close to the migrants play in their attempts to reintegrate their
identities. Both Kenan and Ansa suggest that traditional configurations of the southern
community can challenge the wellbeing of the migrants. The depiction of the return
migrants’ relationship to their home communities in A Visitation of Spirits and Ugly
Ways suggests the migrants are more able to accept the community interferences than
those who do not leave. This tolerance is necessary before the migrants, such as Annie
Ruth, can merge their community-defined and individual identities.
Assent to the southern community-defined identity is not necessarily an
agreement with the parameters of that identity. Instead, it is an acknowledgement of the
limits and expectations imposed by the community as the characters define their
individual identities and work to reconcile the two into a stable whole self. The next
chapter looks at the importance of balancing the community-defined identity with the
individual identity in Mama Day by Gloria Naylor and Home by Toni Morrison.
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CHAPTER IV. INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY FROM THE SOUTH IN
GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY AND TONI MORRISON’S HOME
As discussed in the previous chapter, questions of where community can be
found, what community looks like, and how community can be reconfigured are a
preoccupation of African American return migration novels of the post-Civil Rights era.
From Meridian’s recognition of the transformation of the church community and Avey’s
vision of annually creating a summer community of northerners in the South to Horace
and Ruth’s struggles with their places in their familial communities, the characters’
balancing of their community-defined and individual identities depends largely upon their
understanding and acceptance of the communities to which they belong, but without
allowing those communities to destroy their distinctive selves. The representation of the
individual’s identity distinct from that of his/her community and then the balancing of the
individual and the community is the focus of this chapter.
In their 1985 conversation Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison discuss the gendered
differences between men and women’s individual identities. Despite American
individualism being portrayed in literature as a masculine tradition—exemplified in
Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and Frederick Douglass’s slave narratives—Naylor
and Morrison discuss men’s struggles to communicate individual identities. Morrison
observes, “They have an idea of how to be male and they talk about it a lot. I’m not sure
that they talk to each other about the other thing, personal identity” (192-193). She
clarifies that this difference is not innate, but that men “are trained out of it so early in
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life” (193). Naylor agrees with Morrison, she goes on to describe her favorite female
characters as ones who are selfish, but in a way that is not destructive to others. And by
“selfish,” Naylor means the Hurston model of self-definition. Morrison discusses this
self-definition as self-discovery that “when you see it, it does stay with you even though
you may surrender to whatever your culture’s version of you is supposed to be” (194).
What Morrison identifies here is the presence if not the coexistence of both the selfdefined identity and the community-defined identity.
This chapter looks at Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Toni Morrison’s
Home (2012). I discuss the importance of community in Mama Day and Home relative to
the ideas about community in the previous chapter, but with a recognition that making
distinctions between the community-defined self and the individual self often draws
attention away from the communities to the individuals. Additionally, a physical and
mental distance exists between the focal characters in this chapter and their southern
communities. Both novels have male and female characters that struggle with their
identities and must confront their fragmentation in the space of the South. I will focus
primarily on one character from each novel, Naylor’s Cocoa Day and Morrison’s Frank
Money. I will, however, bring the other characters into the discussion for purposes of
comparison: George Andrews, to supplement Cocoa’s experience in Mama Day, and
Ycidra Money, to augment Frank’s experience in Home. Cocoa and Frank, like the
characters discussed in earlier chapters, are not overtly radical or working at a sociopolitical level. Naylor and Morrison, respectively, portray Cocoa and Frank as working
through their own pasts and their connections with the space of the South in order to
reintegrate and cohere their identities at the individual level.
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As Barbara Christian observes, both Morrison and Naylor are “intrigued by the
effect of place on character” (“Gloria Naylor’s Geography” 99). In the two novels under
study, Naylor and Morrison’s attention to the impact of place on their characters emerges
through both novelists’ placement of their characters in the urban North and the rural
South. Cocoa and Frank are rendered as having fragmented identities that they are unable
to recover in the space of the North. For Cocoa the South to which she returns is
connected to a rich familial history and direct ancestral roots, while Frank’s South is the
hometown his parents adopt when he is a child. Frank does not return to his birth place in
Texas from which his family was displaced when he was a child, nor is his hometown in
Georgia a place with extensive familial roots. While it takes a return to the South for
Cocoa and Frank to address their fragmented selves, the difference in the representation
of what the South has to offer each of them shows possibilities for multiple
configurations of the South. Naylor and Morrison’s depictions of strong communities
existing in the North challenge stereotypes of the North lacking communities only
provided by the South. The clear presence of community in both the North and the South
shifts the focus from the healing power of community to the place required for the
reconciliation of the self to occur. In Naylor and Morrison’s texts, the communities
situated in the North cannot help the individuals recover their identities; such recovery
must take place in the South.
Mama Day tells the story of the Day family, as the youngest generation,
represented by Cocoa, along with the eldest matriarch come to fully understand the power
of their family history. The novels opens with an account of a young man returning from
college to conduct an ethnographic study of his home, but he is unable to make sense of
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the island’s complex history because he does not know the right questions to ask or how
to listen. Cocoa is raised by her grandmother Abigail Day and her great-aunt Mama Day
on the fictional and autonomous Island of Willow Springs, which exists of the coast of
the United States at the border between South Carolina and Georgia. The story picks up
with the already grown Cocoa living in Manhattan, New York, which is followed by a
series of events which return her home to Willow Springs with her new husband George
Andrews. Cocoa’s return to the island ultimately results in her ability to finally ask the
right questions and to hear the spirits residing on the island, but it comes at the expense of
George’s life when he is unable to go along with the rich cultural folk history that dictates
the daily functions on the island.
Critical attention to Mama Day has predominantly focused on the characters of
Miranda “Mama Day” and George. Interest in these two characters is due to the larger
intertextual narratives that surround them. Mama Day/Miranda, gifted with supernatural
powers, is read as Naylor’s response to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, while
George is seen as Naylor’s Christ figure whose position as the messiah is elaborated in
her subsequent novel, Bailey’s Café (1992)67. It is important to point out, however, that
while Mama Day, George, and Cocoa have equal shares in the narrative, questions and
opinions about Cocoa’s identity permeates the text from all narrative perspectives. The
moments in the novel in which Mama Day and George develop as characters
independently from Cocoa are necessary to explain later reactions to Cocoa’s situation.
67
For example, see R. Mark Hall’s “Serving the Second Sun: The Men in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day” and
Shirley A. Stave’s “Re-Writing Sacred Texts: Gloria Naylor’s Revisionary Theology” in the collection
Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth (2001), and Maxine Lavon Montgomery’s The
Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance (2010).
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The main plot line explores Cocoa’s fracturing of her identity and the steps necessary to
recover it.
The narrative structure Naylor employs in Mama Day exemplifies the complex set
of interrelationships involved in the recognition and assertion of a whole self. As
mentioned earlier, the narrative is split between Mama Day/Willow Springs, George, and
Cocoa. Naylor’s use of multiple narrators shows the ways personal histories do not exist
in isolation and the ways the same event is perceived differently by those involved. The
third-person narrative from the point of view of Mama Day and Willow Springs provides
balance to the first-person accounts exchanged between George and Cocoa. By stylizing
the narrative as a dialogue between Cocoa and George, in which their different
interpretations of events and their understandings of each other are revealed, Naylor
shows the external and internal work involved in claiming one’s self.
At the end of Mama Day, it is revealed that Cocoa is sitting on the cliff
overlooking The Sound, having a conversation with George’s spirit. Cocoa does not need
to speak as she communicates with George, but, as is evident by the formation of the
narrative from one of these conversations, readers can hear her. As Cocoa comes to terms
with the loss of George, she realizes the fluidity of her being:
I still don’t have a photograph of you. It’s better this way,
because you change as I change. And each time I go back
over what happened, there’s some new development, some
forgotten corner that puts you in a slightly different light. I
guess one of the reasons I’ve been here so much is that I
felt if we kept retracing our steps, we’d find out what
brought us to this slope near The Sound. But when I see
you again our versions will be different still. (310-311)
Mama Day’s refusal to provide Cocoa with a picture of George and Cocoa’s acceptance
of it give her the space to have new understandings of both George and herself. The
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presence of George’s spirit in Willow Springs gives Cocoa another reason to return to her
home. As she grows and changes she allows George to grow and change with her.
Though she is engaged in a continuous search to understand why she had to lose him to
recover her identity, she realizes that they would never settle on one answer because they
would never be the same people they were at the time it happened. As they continue
changing, the versions of their experiences alter as well. It is through this signal ability to
remain rooted and still change and develop that Cocoa successfully recovers her fractured
self.
Much like Raymond Andrews and Tina McElroy Ansa, in the previous chapters,
Naylor moves her characters between her novels, and as a result she creates a larger
textual universe, a broader framework from which to understand the significance of the
characters’ actions. A reference to Mama Day appears in Naylor’s earlier novel, Linden
Hills (1985), where she is referred to as Willa Prescott-Nedeed’s backwards Great-Aunt.
This connection resurfaces towards the beginning of Mama Day with Mama Day
referencing her experience of the North from when she visits Hope and Willa (38). This
intertextuality between Linden Hills and Mama Day appears relatively subtle, but both
times Willa is referenced in Mama Day, first in Cocoa first-person narration and then by
the third-person narrator, it is directly connected to Cocoa’s experience. As first cousins,
Willa and Cocoa are the most recent generation of the Day family, but Willa’s death
leaves Cocoa as the last descendent of the Day lineage.
Mark Simpson-Vos rightly argues that Mama Day continues the project Linden
Hills begins, this time showing how Cocoa is able to complete her journey to selfdiscovery, where Willa was unable to succeed and instead dies. While Simpson-Vos’
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interpretation of Willa’s outcome as a failure of self-discovery may not be entirely
correct, Naylor’s positioning of her in Mama Day next to Cocoa does invoke the outcome
of Willa’s lost identity in marriage as a possibility for Cocoa. Cocoa’s success is
significantly dependent on a connection to the South, which is missing from Willa’s life.
Mama Day reflects that there was “no reason for little Willa to carry on like she did,
setting herself off from the family and breaking her mother’s heart […] Just before Hope
passed, she’d sent them little Willa’s wedding picture. Miranda remembers the face on
Willa’s husband—like a bottomless pit—and shudders” (Naylor 39). Willa’s downfall is
her disappearance into the “bottomless pit” of her husband Luther Nedeed and his world,
which results in her cutting herself off from everything else, her family included. She
gives up her life and her identity, and by the time she realizes it, it is too far removed for
her to get it back on her own. She does, however, realize her loss of self while imprisoned
by her husband in their basement. This imprisonment enables Willa to rediscover her self
and understand the differences between her individual identity and her communitydefined identity through her discovery of the stories of the other Nedeed women who
suffer similar fates68.
Willa’s process of self-discovery is unaided due to her confinement, but the
journals remaining from the previous Nedeed women, in the forms of photo albums and
cookbooks, guide her through her own discovery with their experiences serving as
models. In many ways Willa succeeds in her journey to self-definition, but the northern
68
As new generations of Luther Nedeed’s are born, new generations of women are married to them and all
suffer similar fates as they lose themselves to their husbands’ control and lose their sons in the process.
During Willa’s time held captive in her basement she discovers the suffering of Luwana Packerville
Nedeed through journal entries scribbled in a bible, followed by Evelyn Creton Nedeed’s recipes which
include lists of ingredients attempting to control or kill her Luther through his food, followed by Priscilla
McGuire Nedeed’s family photos that showed her being shadowed out of her life by her son.
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suburb does not offer her the space to heal after she escapes from her basement prison.
While Mama Day is suspicious of the fire in Linden Hills that kills Willa, she does not
know the circumstances behind it nor Willa’s part in it. Mama Day reflects that “Little
Willa didn’t deserve that kind of end; she was a good enough child if not a whit of
courage” (39). Readers of Linden Hills, however, know that Willa does have the courage
to fight back against her husband. It is the courage to survive alone she is unable to
muster. With these references to Linden Hills in Mama Day, Cocoa and Willa are
immediately setup as foils. Cocoa is described as a strong willed fighter in contrast to
Willa’s meeker demeanor. This story is referenced, however, because there remains the
possibility that Cocoa will live out a similar fate.
The differentiation of Cocoa’s experience and fate from Willa’s appears early in
the novel as well. Cocoa makes it a specific point to return south to Willow Springs every
summer. Her connection to her family is important to her. She notes that “Mama Day and
grandma could forgive [her] for leaving Willow Springs, but not for staying away” (19).
Where Willa’s severing of family ties contributes to her destruction, Cocoa’s
commitment to keeping her connection open signals the possibility of her success. Mama
Day accepts Cocoa’s decision to live in New York, but she remains skeptical of the North
based on her earlier experience in Chicago while visiting Hope and Willa. Mama Day
finally settles on indifference towards the North after continuously scrutinizing the
audience members of Phil Donahue’s show on television. She decides that despite “‘them
mind-altering drugs’” that are “just messing up them young people in Chicago” (67),
“Chicago—and by guilt of association New York—[is] no worse or better than other
places Baby Girl could have chosen to live in” (38). Cocoa’s dedicated connection to the
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South offers her a defense against the dangers of the city. In fact, Mama Day’s view of
the northern city as static is similar to the stereotypical view of the South as stagnate.
Mama Day declines to visit Cocoa in New York because “Those big cities ain’t changed
in the years since she’d visited her folks up there” (38). The years that Mama Day refers
to here are actually decades. Her limited experiences in the North inhibit her perceptions
of its cities.
Likewise, George’s experiences in the South, dictated by football playoffs, are
limited to its cities: New Orleans, Tampa, Miami. He, however, idealizes the South as
rural. He tells Cocoa, “None of those cities seemed like the real South. Nothing like the
place where you came from” (emphasis mine 129). For George the real South is a version
of Willow Springs. Cocoa contributes to George’s stereotype of the South as rural in an
attempt to downplay her life in Willow Springs. She says, “I painted the picture of a
small rural community and my life with Grandma and Mama Day, so it seemed like any
other small southern town and they two old ladies” (126). She portrays Willow Springs as
an average southern town in order to edit out the elements George would not be able to
understand, or believe. She does not mention Mama Day’s ability as a natural healer and
the power of folk beliefs on the island. George’s idealized image of the South is
exemplified upon his arrival in Willow Springs. He reflects, “you had not prepared me
for paradise” (175).
Mama Day and George’s stereotypical views that portray all the North as one city
and the real South as rural are challenged throughout the novel. As Doreen Alvarez Saar
suggests, “If Mama Day exemplifies the spirit of the island of Willow Springs, George
exemplifies the spirit of the island of Manhattan” (74). Yet, functioning as the
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representative spirits of each place, George and Mama Day show the ways the northern
island and the southern island are, after all, not all that different. Cocoa’s experience
navigating both places and in between the two, however, suggests the importance of the
islands’ locations. George understands his “city [as] a network of small towns, some even
smaller than here in Willow Springs” (61) and he describes the small town elements by
the specific behaviors of the people in the area, for example, the reason a Jamaican florist
keeps a certain colored flower. These pieces of personal knowledge come together to
create various small towns within the larger city. George views the knowledge of
individuals in these small towns as the membership into the communities. Similarly, near
the end of novel, Mama Day returns to Cocoa’s New York home after exploring the city
with specific knowledge of various individuals she meets there. She gains personal
information from individuals she encounters on the street and in small shops hidden
between large buildings. This experience changes her opinion of the urban North because
she is able to feel the presence of community.
Although it takes her longer than Mama Day, Cocoa is also able to find
communities in the city. Their ability to construct a sense of community in New York
shows that Cocoa’s struggle with her identity in the North is not due to the absence of
community. Like many others of her generation, Cocoa leaves Willow Springs when she
turns eighteen in order to attend college. Her initial migration is from Willow Springs to
Atlanta, where she spends two years before moving to the North. She remains an outsider
in New York for years until she meets George. Under his tutelage, she is finally able to
look past generalizations and negative stereotypes about New York and see the actual
place, people, and communities that comprise it. Her annual returns to Willow Springs
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function somewhat similarly to the out-islanders’ annual pilgrimages to Carriacou Island
in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow. However, Cocoa’s ability to move
between and perform her northern identity and southern identity without allowing them to
cross prevents her from establishing a stable, whole self.
Kathryn Paterson argues Cocoa’s problem with New York is that she is unwilling
to sacrifice a piece of her identity to attain the freedom she wants and that New York
offers. Cocoa acknowledges the way in which she made her New York existence entirely
separate from her home and the person she is in Willow Springs. Sacrificing a piece of
her identity, however, is not a viable solution, as suggested by Paterson. Instead, Cocoa
must accept her entire identity, both northern and southern, and allow them to operate
outside of their designated spaces. This would enable her to recognize her whole self and
nurture her individual identity. Then, she would be able to change “as much as [she]
want[s] without the night mare of waking up a total stranger” (Naylor 50). The freedom
New York offers her is only possible once she reconciles the different parts of her
identity.
Despite Cocoa’s efforts to keep her two identities separate, George believes her
southern identity, though overlaid, comes through. George is interested in knowing the
“real” Cocoa. As he reflects upon their first meeting, he notes that he was looking for
Cocoa’s identity that had been displaced by the individual sitting in front of him:
All I wanted was for you to be yourself. And I wondered if
it was too late, if seven years in New York had been just
enough for you to lose that, like you were trying to lose
your southern accent […] That’s why I wanted you to call
me George. There isn’t a southerner alive who could bring
that name in under two syllables. And for those brief
seconds it allowed me to imagine you as you must have
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been: softer, slower—open […] But it was a fact that when
you said my name, you became yourself. (33)
During her seven years in New York Cocoa has not lost her self, she has supplanted it.
Even though George has never met her before, he still realizes that the woman in front of
him is performing an identity that is disconnected from who she really is. He attempts to
reconstruct who she once was, as in a palimpsest, based on his knowledge of her having
the remnants of a southern accent. At this moment, he creates an illusion of who Cocoa is
in his own mind, playing off his stereotypes of the South, which make the southern
Cocoa “softer, slower—open.” Based on this understanding of Cocoa, George situates
Cocoa’s identity in the accent that emerges when she says certain words, like his name.
While Cocoa’s accent may reveal some background information about her life, her
displacement of her identity is much more than her attempt to hide her accent. Her
creation of two separate selves, her Willow Springs identity and an entirely separate New
York identity, becomes entangled with George and New York. Even though George
claims to desire access to her southern sense of self, he continues to call her Ophelia not
Cocoa, thus accessing her northern identity instead of her southern one.
It is not until George finally journeys to Willow Springs with Cocoa, after four
years of marriage, that Cocoa is forced to confront the division of her identity. Cocoa
recognizes her New York self as a small piece of a larger whole that exists for her only in
Willow Springs: “Regardless of how well you thought you knew me, it was only one part
of me. The rest of me—the whole of me—was here. And I wondered how you would take
the transformation, beginning with something as basic as my name” (176). She
acknowledges that she spent the last eleven years in New York with only a part of her
self present. Since Cocoa has always been Ophelia to George, his presence forces her
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New York identity to confront her Willow Springs identity. Entrance into Cocoa’s world
will involve George witnessing a transformation in Ophelia and experiencing a Cocoa he
does not yet know.
What Cocoa identifies as basic, her name, might be basic in George’s eyes, but
for Cocoa her multiple names allow her to support and reject different identities. In her
childhood, Cocoa receives three different names, one from her mother, one from her
grandmother, and one from her great-aunt. Her proper name, Ophelia, was given to her at
birth by her mother. Ophelia was her great-grandmother’s name, who had thrown herself
off the cliff into The Sound after being unable to find peace following the accidental well
drowning of her oldest daughter, Peace. In relation to their family history, the passing on
of Ophelia as her name creates a new opportunity for an Ophelia to find peace; a previous
attempt, where Abigail named her first daughter Peace failed to restore peace when she
died within days of birth. The naming of Ophelia after her great-grandmother connects
her to the past through her family’s legacy and places the weight of certain expectations
for her to fulfill. Ophelia, however, is not a name that any of the community members of
Willow Springs knows her by. Instead, Ophelia is the name she uses in New York and
that she attaches to her New York self.
The most important of Cocoa’s names, and the one she rejects, is her crib name.
Mama Day states that the name Baby Girl was the “name that helped to hold her here”
(267) to the world of the living. The importance of her crib name developed out of the
difficulty Day women had surviving. The crib name her grandmother gives her is The
Baby Girl:
No—this was one girl they would not let get away. But that
little ball of pale fire, spitting up practically every ounce of
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goat’s milk she could finally take, pulling Mother’s china
knickknacks off the curio before she could barely crawl,
running before she could walk—she was the baby girl.
They dropped the “the” when they were sure she was gonna
stay. (emphasis original 39)
At the time of Cocoa’s birth, Mama Day, Abigail, and Cocoa’s mother, Grace, who they
are losing as she slowly goes out of her mind with anger at being abandoned by Cocoa’s
father, are the only Days left in Willow Springs. While Hope, Willa’s mother, stays in
touch, she does not return to Willow Springs, and Willa is raised in Chicago without the
influence of the island and its familial connections. Physically Hope and Willa have
gotten away and it is clear to Mama Day that they are close to losing Grace, so Cocoa is
the only hope for the survival of the Days. Naming her The Baby Girl, in a sense,
represents a new start for the women in the Day family, ensuring that she will be the one
female to not just survive, but to reconcile the past and present. As a child, Cocoa does
not understand the significance of the name Baby Girl, what that name represents for her
future, or what that name means for the recognition of her self.
At age five she consciously rejects the name Baby Girl by refusing to answer it
because she associates being called Baby with being a baby or treated like a baby. By
refusing her crib name, Cocoa loses the wholeness of her identity that will take her
decades to recover. She is finally given her pet name, Cocoa, by Mama Day. While
Cocoa rejects Baby Girl and the identity that she beleives accompanies it, “[Mama Day]
and Abigail kept calling her exactly what she was between themselves, and where it
counted most of all—in their minds” (40). For Mama Day and Abigail the power of the
name was in its existence and their own knowledge of its cultural power and
metaphysical significance. The fact that the name remains spoken in private between the
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two of them and that Ophelia/Cocoa exists in her entirety within their minds as Baby Girl
is enough to preserve the possibilities of Cocoa’s future. Mama Day knows that one day
Cocoa will return to the name and all it represents: “She’ll answer to Baby Girl again
when she’s a mama in her own right—there’ll be no need to explain to the silly thing
what she’s been knowing all along” (40). Her “knowing all along” is that Baby Girl
represents her whole self; it is this knowledge that has been lost to her and that she has to
restore in her own time.
Cocoa’s reconciliation of her identity to Baby Girl does not begin until she returns
to Willow Springs with George. When Cocoa encounters Willow Springs with George,
she experiences an encounter between her identities when Ophelia and Cocoa finally
occupy the same space: “It was Cocoa’s bedroom we were going to share, and I watched
Ophelia’s husband carefully unpacking his clothes […] I felt as if we were going to have
an illicit affair” (176-177). Cocoa’s separation of selves is so defined that she is unable to
recognize herself as Ophelia and Cocoa at the same time. George’s presence in Cocoa’s
bedroom is both unnatural since Cocoa and George are strangers, and natural because
when Cocoa is with George she is Ophelia. In order to negotiate the illicit affair she sees
unfolding before her, Ophelia claims Cocoa’s room as her and George’s space—a New
York within Willow Springs that no one else has access to. This shifting of space allows
Cocoa to temporarily maintain her separate selves, but other experiences in Willow
Springs make it more difficult to distinguish between the two identities.
Cocoa’s worry about George’s experiencing southern Cocoa as an entirely
different woman than northern Ophelia distracts her from the real issue: she has two
disparate selves, unable to function as one. Willow Springs as a place with “living
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mirrors” shows Cocoa stuck as a child, while Ophelia is a grown woman. She does not
understand why she is unable to be an adult in Willow Springs: “No, my temper was
nothing new to you but, try as I might, I became a child again in this house. You
respected Ophelia’s anger just as she respected yours. How would you react seeing that
Cocoa’s anger, whether coddled or dismissed, was never taken seriously here?” (177).
Cocoa becomes a child again in her grandmother’s home because she does not let the
child version of Cocoa grow into the adult version of Ophelia. This separation also takes
a toll on Ophelia. Since Ophelia is kept separate from Cocoa, she has no childhood and
no past. As a child, Cocoa saw the name Baby Girl as trapping her into a baby-like status.
But her rejection of that name and the whole self it represents leaves her with a lived
experience as Cocoa in Willow Springs, which even as a thirty-two-year-old woman
finds her still in a child-like status. Cocoa’s task becomes connecting Ophelia and Cocoa,
so that Ophelia has a past, a strong sense of self and belonging, and Cocoa has a future.
Cocoa’s knowledge of her separate selves and the limitations they create for her is
present from the beginning of her relationship with George. It is not until she marries him
that she realizes the dangers of not having her whole self. Cocoa’s standards for her and
George’s relationship are much higher than those of Mama Day and Abigail, but she
realizes it is her own limitations that are going to be the problem:
And I wanted us to work so badly that I would be tempted
to try and squeeze myself up into whatever shape you had
calculated would fit into your plans. How long could I do
it? The answer scared the hell out of me: I could have done
it forever. […] ‘She has all I have,’ you told my
grandmother on our honeymoon. But I was determined that
we were going to have a life that would work. (emphasis
original 146)
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Cocoa is aware of the sacrifices she might have to make for marriage, but she envisions a
limit to what she would be willing to give. Mama Day interprets George’s statement,
“She has all I have,” as “sharing. If he got a nickel, she’s got a part in it. He got a dream,
he’s gonna take her along. If he got a life, Abigail, he’s saying that life can open itself up
for her. You can’t ask no more than that from a man” (136). What Mama Day views as a
statement about partnership, Cocoa interprets as his life having an already determined
space for her to fit into. She does not simply want George to share his life with her. She
wants the two of them to create and share their life together. She becomes aware,
however, that she cannot ask this of George until she understands who she is apart from
him, so she can participate in their creation of a life together.
In order for Cocoa to merge her separate identities, she needs the same love and
belief from George that she gives to him. Although George is presented as loving Cocoa
as much as she loves him and makes compromises for her to do the things she wants to
do, Naylor suggests that George’s love is not enough to heal Cocoa. George is unable to
understand the Cocoa of Willow Springs, since she is an entirely different person from
the Ophelia of New York. It is George’s ability to understand and believe in Cocoa’s past
and the community she is from that will allow Cocoa to reconcile her two selves. In
Willow Springs one of the strongest male presences, Dr. Buzzard, publically displays his
beliefs in hoodoo, but he is presented as a fool because he does not actually have the
power to perform any of the practices he believes in. Hoodoo is shown as a part of the
power of women; even though Mama Day publically rejects the idea, when Cocoa falls ill
to it, Mama Day retaliates by practicing some herself. But, it is not the retaliation that
would save Cocoa. The biggest challenge for them to overcome in order to save Cocoa’s
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life is to undo the separation of selves that Cocoa had spent the past eleven years
solidifying. Despite the fact that the hoodoo practiced on the island is exclusively female,
the ability to fight it rests with George and
for a brief moment Miranda allows herself to wish that it
wasn’t so, that she’d never left to go beyond the bridge and
still belonged only to them. She had fought for her life
when she was theirs and she could fight for it again, give
up her own life if need be. But what ain’t so, just ain’t so.
Baby Girl done tied up her mind and her flesh with George,
and above all, Ruby knew it. (265)
Ophelia does not belong to them and is separate from Cocoa and Willow Springs. Mama
Day’s wish that Cocoa had never gone beyond the bridge is based on the weakening of
her healing power in Cocoa’s life. The idea of Cocoa “belonging” to Mama Day and
Abigail is not with her as a possession, but with them as place in which she fits, the home
in which she would always belong. At the same time, Cocoa also created a home and
place in which another piece of her fit with George, and belonged to him as well. It is the
New York piece of her, the Ophelia, which Ruby attacks, removing the power of
restoration solely from Mama Day to include George. Ruby’s practicing of hoodoo on
Cocoa represents the importance of Cocoa’s reconciliation of her two identities in order
to survive. Her whole self, embodied through Baby Girl could survive Ruby’s attack, her
fragmented identities will kill her.
Mama Day acknowledges that there are two possible ways to save Cocoa; both
are dependent on the choices George makes. Cocoa’s struggle to unite her two identities
is dependent on George’s ability to enter into her world with the piece of her identity she
had developed in his world. Prior to Cocoa’s relationship with George, Mama Day could
have accessed Ophelia’s identity, but after seeing them together she “realizes there’s a
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whole world in there that she ain’t got nothing to do with” (232). George has the strength
and ability to fight Cocoa’s battle with her, but he has to be willing to believe in the
female community of Willow Springs. The most productive way to heal Cocoa is for
George to unite with Mama Day in order to unite Cocoa and Ophelia:
He believes in himself—deep within himself—‘cause he
ain’t never had a choice. And he keeps it protected down in
his center, but she needs that belief buried in George. Of
his own accord he has to hand it over to her. She needs his
hand in hers—his very hand—so she can connect it up with
all the believing that had gone before. A single moment
was all she asked, even a fingertip to touch hers here at the
other place. So together they could be the bridge for Baby
Girl to walk over. (emphasis original 285)
What Mama Day needs from George is for him to join the Willow Springs community
and root his identity outside of himself. The connecting of Cocoa’s past, through Mama
Day, and Ophelia’s present, through George, allows her to “walk over” into her future,
the future of Baby Girl. Mama Day and George coming together would represent the
blending of Cocoa’s communities and the ability for Cocoa to merge her selves. It
depends on George’s ability to believe in her family and community of Willow Springs,
which represents his believing in Cocoa, and as a result providing the support she needs
from him to incorporate Ophelia into Cocoa. George lacks a community-defined identity
since he has never been a part of a community. This makes Mama Day’s request of him
more than he can handle. Despite his best efforts and love for Ophelia/Cocoa, however,
George is unable to be a part of bridging that space for her. He chooses to save Cocoa his
own way, in which he rejects the knowledge of her female community.
These community connections that are so strong for Cocoa do not exist for
George who grew up an orphan in a state orphanage. George lacks a community, family,
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and a home to connect to, and his understanding of his self has been much more
independently constructed. Mama Day acknowledges that George has successfully
created his home space as “his own place within him” (285). Unlike Cocoa, George has
kept his identity grounded within him, independent from both place and any outside
community connections. Since he does not have a home space rooted outside of his body,
George is unable to understand the separation of selves and complexities of Cocoa’s
subjectivity that depend on the South. When they first begin spending time together and
George shows her the New York he knows, he has a similar revelation about Cocoa’s self
that he had in his office when he first met her: “And it had been loads of fun, watching
you change. You were becoming different, you were going back to the way you were”
(100). George is witnessing a change in Cocoa that occurs as she sees and appreciates
New York through the eyes of a New Yorker. Cocoa is finding her place in New York.
However, George once again assumes she is just being herself again, “going back” to
who she was before, instead of moving forward and creating someone new.
Cocoa fully creates a new identity through her relationship with George, which
she situates within him and within his knowing of New York. It is this identity that
George comes to know in its entirety. He does not realize she is residing in a small piece
of herself. George’s assumed knowledge about Cocoa turns into a power and ownership
of her: “the face I could read so well now. The lean body that held no more secrets bent
over the railing. I liked that knowing which could only deepen as we went on together. A
comfortable form of possessiveness. Only I owned the codes to a certain turn of her head,
a slight narrowing of her eyes, the varying textures of her silences” (159). In claiming
knowledge of her, he emphasizes all of the things he does not and cannot know about her
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from his current position within his world. He presents his knowledge as a physical
knowledge of her body, head, and eyes, and attaches textures to her silences. The Cocoa
that George does not know is in the secrets remaining in those silences. The Cocoa he
does not know cannot be owned and possessed. George’s inability to understand the
importance of place prevents him from understanding that there are others, such as Mama
Day and Abigail, who hold that same ability to read Cocoa’s mannerisms and
expressions. For George to truly begin to understand Cocoa, he must enter into her world
with an open mind about what he will find there. To do this, he must put his trust in
others.
George has already shown that he is able to remove his status as outsider to the
Willow Springs community during his morning at the barber shop. In this male space of
Willow Springs, he is able to connect to the male community, as he learns things about
the men that Cocoa does not know. However, even his knowledge of the men stops short
of understanding their spiritual practices and beliefs, which largely structure their
community. Alvarez Saar argues that the problem with George is his role in separating
Cocoa from her Willow Springs heritage and female community. George’s problem is not
just that he distances her from this other community, but that he is unable to understand
how to become a part of it. Mama Day offers George a way into the female space of the
Willow Springs community by him trusting her knowledge and working with her to
bridge the space for Cocoa to reunite her selves. Ultimately, it is the female space in
which George is afraid to place his belief.
George’s inability to trust and place his faith in the power of Cocoa’s female
community causes him to choose, his death, the second way to save Cocoa. Instead of
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working with Mama Day from within the female community to create “the bridge for
Baby Girl to walk over” (285), reconciling the worlds and identities of Ophelia and
Cocoa, George releases Ophelia with his death, leaving Cocoa and Ophelia behind to
form a new whole self. Cocoa no longer needs to reconcile two identities, however, she
lets her New York version of Ophelia go with George. Cocoa reflects on her loss: “I
thought my world had come to an end. And I wasn’t really wrong—one of my worlds
had. But being so young, I didn’t understand that every hour we keep living is building
material for a new world, of some sort” (302). After recovering, she makes a permanent
return to the South because she is unable to face New York without the person who made
it a home for her. Her return is not to Willow Springs, however, but to Charleston.
Cocoa’s self-discovery and self-definition that occur during her physical recovery,
following George’s death, also change the spiritual hold on the island of Willow Springs.
She further breaks down the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the
spirits, both signals her embodiment of a stronger power than Mama Day and allows her
to have the conversation with George that constitutes the novel.
Naylor presents the possibility for the South to be a place of recovery for both
black men and women, but certain criteria must be met. George’s downfall can be
attributed to his value of northern individualism and inability to place his trust in others,
which prevent him from discovering a community-defined identity with which to merge
his very strong individual identity. His fate, however, is not the only possibility; he could
have accessed his own past and allowed himself to recoup and reconcile his lost identity.
While Naylor suggests that the recovery of a whole self in the South functions the same
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way for black men and women, Morrison complicates the notion by considering the
gendered ways characters recover community-defined identity versus individual identity.
Morrison’s Home recounts the story of siblings, a brother and sister, who leave
and return to the small, rural town of Lotus, Georgia. Both have been neglected and
mistreated due to difficult circumstances faced by their parents, and both suffer the
consequences of fragmented identities. Positioning their healing side-by-side, Morrison
highlights the gendered experience of community by showing Cee’s recovery occurring
in a close nit circle of women, while Frank’s healing occurs outside the space of the
community. Like Cocoa, George, and Mama Day, Frank is able to find communities in
the North and he relies on them to get him back to the South. They assist him in his return
migration, but once he is back in Lotus he remains outside of his home community.
Unlike George’s experience in Willow Springs, Frank is not invited into the female
community to become a part of his sister’s healing. While both Frank and Cee have
community-defined identities—Cee’s is fairly destructive to her wellbeing—neither of
them are able to construct individual identities until they are able to recognize themselves
as separate from one another.
A 1998 special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination focused on the role of
the South Toni Morrison’s works. In one of the volume’s articles “The Politics of Space:
Southernness and Manhood in the Fictions of Toni Morrison,” Herman Beavers argues
that for Morrison’s male characters
the South is a duality, oscillating between a place of origin
and a curse […] in light of their experiences in the North,
the South can also serve as the one place these men can
recall where they are not rendered faceless and anonymous.
As an experience, as a place, as a way of being, the South
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never leaves them, creating and corrupting the integrity of
their lives. (61)
Beavers focuses on Morrison’s male characters—such as Cholly Breedlove, Macon
Dead, Sr., Son Green, Guitar Banes, and Joe Trace—who are unable to recognize and
appropriately respond to the duality of the South which ultimately leads to their
destruction. In contrast to those unable to productively respond, there are characters—
such as Milkman Dead, Paul D, and, most recently, Frank Money—that are able to
confront their pasts or their family’s pasts in the South and achieve new understandings
of their own subjectivities.
Briefly comparing Milkman’s migration to the South from Song of Solomon
(1977) to Frank’s migration to the South will show the alternative stakes possible in
Morrison’s treatment of the return migration as she offers two very different experiences
and goals for her characters within the South. Milkman and Frank are roughly of the
same generation and their narratives occur less than a decade apart, Frank’s in the 1950s
and Milkman’s in the 1950s and 1960s. In relation to the stable construction of the self
the two have opposite gaps their identities: Milkman is so wrapped up in himself that he
remains disengaged from any community and Frank understands his position connected
to the communities around him while being unable to function separate from them.
Milkman is unable to become a part of communities in the North, including his familial
community. He defines himself separate from everyone else and sees himself as superior
to others69 through his father’s successful financial positioning in the northern
community as owner of many rental properties. As such, his sister Lena despises him and
he is responsible for the destruction of his cousin Hagar. Frank, on the other hand, defines
69
See Philip Page’s Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels for a
discussion of Milkman’s fragmentation and reintegration into community.
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himself in relation to others from his community, specifically Mike and Stuff. When he
loses Mike and Stuff in the war, his lack of individual identity prevents him from
returning to his home community in the South. Frank also defines himself connected to
his sister and his loyalty to her is what finally draws him back to the South.
For the two characters, the reintegration of the self and self-assertion lies in the
return to the South. The entire second half of Song of Solomon depicts Milkman’s
breakdown and process towards recovery, which is achieved at the end. Milkman’s
temporary return to the South70 of his ancestors Shalimar, Virginia, allows him to
discover his self in relation to community: “The healing of Milkman’s own brokenness—
not only as an individual but as a representative of an entire Black generation—requires
Milkman’s restoration to the community of his ancestors, and that requires, literally, the
discovery of their names” (Lee 111). Frank’s healing, on the other hand, requires selfdefinition, separate from his community and sister, which the rest of this chapter will
look at in depth. Through the varied experiences of Milkman and Frank, Morrison
suggests the South holds both ancestors—to balance the individual identity that lacks
community enhancement—and the room for solitude—to balance the community-defined
identity that is missing individual self-definition. While the southern return is only a
temporary trek for Milkman, it appears to hold more finality for Frank.
Frank’s decision to leave his hometown of Lotus, Georgia is not driven by the
desire to attend college in the North; instead, his departure is enabled by his joining the
Army. In an attempt to convince his sister of his decision, “He tried to tell her the army
was the only solution. Lotus was suffocating, killing him and his two best friends. They
all agreed” (35). He does not join the army to be a soldier, but as a way to get out of his
70
See Griffin’s analysis of Milkman’s return in her migration study Who Set you Flowin’?
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small, rural town. Throughout his childhood, Frank is unsatisfied with his life in Lotus.
He longs to live in a place with more action and more to offer him. He acknowledges,
“My family was content or maybe just hopeless living that way. I understand. Having
been run out of one town, any other that offered safety and the peace of sleeping through
the night and not waking up with a rifle in your face was more than enough. But it was
less than enough for me” (84). Lotus represents safety for his family who were once
chased out of their hometown in Texas. Frank does not know if it is peace or fear that
keeps them within the space of Lotus’s all black community, but neither reason is
sufficient enough to keep him there. Likewise, Cee finds her way out of town by
marrying a young man from the city. After they move to Atlanta and he abandons her,
she refuses to return. Neither sibling is able to recognize any value in their Lotus
community.
The sanctuary the Lotus community offers their parents’ generation does not
extend to the younger generation; instead, the community-defined identities obstruct their
individual identities. For Frank, his community-defined identity is as one-third of a trio
including Mike and Stuff. Frank’s decision to leave Lotus to join the army is not made on
his own, but with his two best friends. They leave Lotus together, enlist together, and
serve together in the Korean War. Frank, however, is the only one to survive the war. He
returns to the United States missing both his community-defined identity through Mike
and Stuff, and his individual identity. Frank does not know how to return to his home
community without the two men he spent his life joined to:
he didn’t want to go home without his ‘homeboys.’ He was
far too alive to stand before Mike’s folks or Stuff’s. His
easy breath and unscathed self would be an insult to them.
And whatever lie he cooked up about how bravely they
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died, he could not blame their resentment. Besides, he
hated Lotus. Its unforgiving population, its isolation, and
especially its indifference to the future were only tolerable
only if his buddies were there with him. (17)
Frank’s inability to return to Lotus is partially a result of his experiencing survivor’s
guilt. He assumes that he will be judged and rejected by Mike and Stuff’s parents. His
previous experience in Lotus also causes him to view the community as generally
unsupportive. Frank also connects the identity of Lotus with Mike and Stuff. His return
would force him to define the place and his self separate from the two of them. This is
something Frank is unprepared to do after the war and while he is still committed to
maintaining his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
After he comes back from the war and decides he cannot return to the South,
Frank spends his time wandering around Seattle and mentally reliving the deaths of his
two friends. This results in PTSD episodes that are entirely out of his control. He later
admits that “he had covered his guilt and shame [about his own actions in the war] with
big-time mourning for his dead buddies. Day and night he had held on to that suffering
because it let him off the hook, kept the Korean child hidden” (135). His only temporary
reprieve from his reliving the war memories comes when he meets Lily. The two meet
after Frank regains his composure following a four-day PTSD episode. The narrator
recounts their first meeting, “She smiled when she spoke. He did not return the smile, but
his eyes had such a quiet, faraway look—like people who made their living staring at
ocean waves—she relented” (74). Frank attempts to take shelter in this woman, but his
inability to acknowledge his actions in the war keep Lily at a distance. Lily’s narrative
repeatedly recounts this same image of Frank with his faraway look directed for hours at
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the wall. Frank’s loss of community-defined identity and inability to deal with his own
actions that might reflect his individual identity keep him trapped within himself.
His “big-time mourning” for Mike and Stuff keep his state of mind fixed on his
experience in Korea. As their relationship wears on, Lily’s frustration with Frank’s PTSD
slowly grows because she has plans and dreams about her future. Although Frank gets
work and brings his money home to Lily, “When she questioned him about the future,
what he wanted to do, he said, ‘stay alive’” (76). His inability to plan for the future and
his nudging of his mind to relive those scenes of his best friends’ deaths in Korea cause
Lily to feel relief when he leaves to save his sister. When Frank receives the brief letter,
“‘Come fast. She be dead if you tarry’” (8), he is brought back into the role of his sister’s
protector. His desire for the future shifts from staying alive to keeping his sister alive:
“Maybe his life had been preserved for Cee, which was only fair since she had been his
original caring-for, a selflessness without gain or emotional profit” (34-35). Frank’s
relationship with his sister is presented as a pure, untarnished bond that once again gives
him a purpose in life. His journey back to the South to save Cee requires Frank to let go
of the loss of Mike and Stuff and attempt to understand his self separate from them.
Like Naylor, Morrison employs multiple narrative perspectives in the telling of
Home. The narrative moves back and forth between a third-person omniscient
consciousness that narrates most of the story, and the protagonist Frank’s first-person
voice. The third-person omniscient narrator focuses on a different character each chapter,
presenting the story from third-person perspectives of Frank, Cee, Lily, and Lenore. Each
is given his/her own chapter and then, at the end, Frank has two more chapters and he and
Cee share two chapters. While the third-person accounts from the various perspectives
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serve to verify and reinforce the other versions given, Frank’s first-person narration, like
Cocoa’s at the end of Mama Day, calls into question the truth of the narrative being told.
However, rather than providing theoretical musings on knowledge and the questionable
nature of memory as Cocoa provides, Frank’s first-person narration deliberately
questions Morrison herself, as the author, and contradicts the narrative provided by the
third-person omniscient narrator. This device of the novel draws attention to the
individual characters’ subjectivities, and also raises questions of third-person omniscient
narrators’ reliability when it comes to character interiority. More specifically this
technique works within the novel to allow Frank to reclaim his subjectivity by speaking
his own experience.
In the same conversation between Morrison and Naylor referenced earlier, the two
writers discuss the phenomenon of their characters speaking to them as a medium for
their stories. Morrison reflects, “I have to have very overt conversations with these
people. Before I could sort of let it disguise itself as the artist’s monologue with herself
but there’s no time for that foolishness now. Now I have to call them by their names and
ask them to reappear and tell me something or leave me alone even” (209). She goes on
to evaluate the process, noting that “Some people are embarrassed about it; they both fear
and distrust it also; they don’t solidify and recreate the means by which one enters into
that place where those people are. I think the more black women write, the more easily
one will be able to talk about those things” (210). The artist’s monologue is actually what
is missing from Home. Morrison recreates, instead, the world in which her characters use
her as a conduit for their experiences. We are presented with Frank’s voice and
explanations of events in his life and, then, those experiences are translated into a third-
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person account. Frank’s direct address to Morrison, as writer, occurs in seven of his eight
sections. In many ways, Morrison provides a larger commentary on the writing process
by embracing her very real experiences with the character Frank71. She overtly portrays
for readers and other writers the authorial situation, she earlier suggests, writers are
uncomfortable acknowledging.
Frank’s dictation to Morrison appears to be from a vantage point where he can see
what is being written because he does not simply tell his story, but inquires into the
aspects of his story that make it on the page. He begins by providing her with helpful
notes, before progressing to challenges, and then revising the previous information
conveyed to readers. The first time Frank addresses Morrison/the author is in his first
section before the third-person narration begins. He steps in early to prevent the
misrepresentation of his story, specifically addressing a childhood memory that could be
interpreted as dictating all his future actions. Frank tells Morrison, “Since you’re set on
telling my story, whatever you think and whatever you write down, know this: I really
forgot about the burial” (5). He begins by drawing attention to the fact that he does not
have narrative control over the telling of his story. It also appears that he has previously
made some attempt to stop Morrison from writing it, but is now resigned to the fact that
he cannot stop its telling. Morrison has the ability to think or write anything regardless of
what Frank thinks she should. His clarification of this specific point about the witnessing
of a traumatic burial as a child suggests he does not want his entire experience defined by
a moment he claims he has long forgotten. His remembering of this forgotten moment is
71
This interview takes place while Morrison is in the process of writing Beloved. She addresses a different
kind of responsibility involved when invoking characters inspired by the dead. Likewise, in the notanda
section of M. NourbeSe Philips’s Zong! (2008), Philips exposes a similar experience as she pieces together
her journal entries and explains her position as medium for Setaey Adamu Boateng, the ancestor speaking
through her.
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important to the reintegration of his self at the end of his story, though it is not the only
incident to fissure it.
While Morrison does Frank the courtesy of including his first-person accounts
and responses to the way his story is told, her third-person narrator constructs a narrative
that has points of opposition with Frank’s accounts. Initially these contradictions are at
the level of interpretation. In Frank’s third section, he has a somewhat heated response to
the narrator’s description of the motivations behind his actions:
You are dead wrong if you think I was just scouting for a
home with a bowl of sex in it. I wasn’t. Something about
her floored me, made me want to be good enough for her.
Is that too hard for you to understand? Earlier you wrote
about how sure I was that the beat-up man on the train to
Chicago would turn around when they got home and whip
the wife who tried to help him. Not true. I didn’t think any
such thing. What I thought was that he was proud of her
but didn’t want to show how proud he was to the other men
on the train. I don’t think you know much about love.
Or me. (69)
Frank rebuts incorrect representations of two separate incidents involving relationships
between men and women in the narrative. The responses the narrator offers Frank depict
him as callous, but he provides more complex explanations to these incidents. These
events also describe intimate moments between men and women with limited
understandings of how they are perceived by and between men. In response to the assault
of the black man on the train and his wife’s attempt to help him, Frank rejects the notion
that the only option for a black man in that situation is to beat his wife and that “She
would have to pay for that broken nose. Over and over again” (26). Frank suggests that
the man’s public irritation with his wife is necessary to keep his masculinity intact in
front of other men, but it does not necessarily translate to private violence when the two
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are out of view of other men. He claims this anonymous black man’s public reaction
represents the man’s performance of his community-defined identity, but underneath that
role is an individual reaction based on his personal relationship with his wife. Readers do
not know what happens when the couple gets home because both accounts are presented
as Frank’s thoughts. Their importance, then, is that it gives insight into Frank and his
actions, an insight normally only experienced by Morrison as the author. Furthermore,
readers see the differences between the account the character delivers and how the author
develops and interprets it through the writing process.
Ultimately, in this section, Frank questions Morrison’s understanding of how love
functions and her knowledge of him as a character. Despite Frank’s PTSD panics,
blackouts, and violent outbursts, he never behaves violently towards his girlfriend, Lily.
Frank acknowledges his perceived power over women he has intimate relationships with.
He claims to know how to break the softness inside of them, but he chooses not to do so.
Lily is Frank’s attempt to find his place in the United States outside of the South after
returning from Korea. The first time he meets her he reflects, “I felt like I’d come home.
Finally” (68). He tries to construct his home within her, seeking protection from the
world. His past experiences in the South and in Korea, however, prevent him from
finding relief with her. Although Lily can offer Frank shelter, she cannot heal him. He
acknowledges his commitment to a life with her, saying, “I was wide open for her. If it
wasn’t for that letter, I’d still be hanging from her apron strings. She had no competition
in my mind except for the horses, a man’s foot, and Ycidra trembling under my arm”
(69). His love for Lily is only surpassed by his love for his sister. The traumatic burial
that involved the horses, the man’s foot, and a terrified Cee reemerges for Frank during
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his time as a soldier in Korea, when his identity falls apart (3-5, 97-100). This memory
calls him back to the South because he must reconcile it to resolve the trauma of his
action in the Korean War. He tells Morrison, “Don’t paint me as some enthusiastic hero.
I had to go but I dreaded it” (81). He has to return because he is his sister’s protector. He
is driven by love and responsibility for a sister he spent much of his childhood raising. He
does not feel he is being heroic, but doing what any man should do.
Cee’s situation allows him to confront his fractured identity. After he is in the
position to take action and save his sister from her death, he changes an account from his
time in Korea. He has been haunted throughout the novel by the image of a little girl
whose death he witnesses while in Korea. This event is relayed to readers three different
times. The first and second accounts are relatively the same. Frank describes his watching
the child, who is scavenging for food near a trash heap, when the soldier “blows her
away” (95). The third-person narrator then relays Frank watching the young girl “before
the guard blew her head off” (100). The third version of the story comes once again from
Frank’s section after he returns to the South and Cee is healthy again. He explains that his
earlier version was not correct: “I have to say something to you right now. I have to tell
the whole truth. I lied to you and I lied to me. I hid it from you because I hid it from me
[…] You can keep on writing, but I think you ought to know what’s true” (133-134). He is
finally able to admit his role as a soldier in Korea. He reveals that he is not just a
spectator of his friends’ deaths and violence done by other soldiers, but that he killed a
young Korean girl who was scavenging for food. These narrative discrepancies show the
work of the author to take the character’s story and adapt it in the way that he/she sees fit.
In this instance, Morrison does not retell this piece of the story a second time in the third-
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person narrative; she leaves the new revelation out of the story she is writing. This
admission does, however, have an impact on the character. Frank finally faces the event
that he kept trying to cover with his memory of Mike and Stuff’s deaths which come after
he encounters the Korean girl. It is through this confession that he is able to complete his
healing. This admission does not come until he is back in his hometown watching his
sister come to terms with her inability to ever have children.
The South becomes the site where he can therapeutically acknowledge his own
experiences and actions to himself, both those that occurred in and outside of the South.
The call to home for Frank comes from a stranger, Sarah, who writes him a letter about
his sister simply stating, “‘Come fast. She be dead if you tarry’” (8). Frank articulates his
displeasure for his small, rural Georgia town claiming that only his love for his sister
could make him return.
Frank’s movement around the country after enlisting is dictated by the United
States government. He moves from Lotus to Kentucky to San Diego, then to Korea, and
back to Seattle, Washington. His return migration, by way of Portland, Oregon and
Chicago, Illinois, is the first move he makes without Mike and Stuff. In both of these
cities he is reminded of the dangers in the North. Reverend and Mrs. Locke who help
Frank in Seattle after he escapes from a mental hospital warn him, “you come from
Georgia, and you been in a desegregated army and maybe you think up North is way
different from down South. Don’t believe it and don’t count on it. Custom is just as real
as law and can be just as dangerous” (19). Frank experiences instances of segregation and
police harassment as he travels back to Georgia, but these instances are kept relatively
minor in the narrative. The reverend’s warning about the North and the South offering
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similar difficulties ironically reinforces the fact that Frank is not being protected from the
South through remaining in the North.
It is significant that, like Avey who feels more and more whole the nearer she is
to her roots, the closer frank gets to the South, aided by stationed guides, the better he is
able to deal with the symptoms of his PTSD. Frank finds extended community across the
United States that helps him get back to the South. In a Chicago diner, he finds one such
guide in the form of the connection he makes to the community he did not have on the
west coast:
Booker’s was not only a good and cheap place to eat, but
its company—diners, counter help, waitresses, and a loud
argumentative cook—was welcoming and high-spirited.
Laborers and the idle, mothers and street women, all ate
and drank with the ease of family in their own kitchens. It
was that quick, down-home friendliness that led Frank to
talk freely to the man on the stool next to his who
volunteered his name. (27-28)
This down-home friendliness reflects a carryover by the number of migrants from the
South living in Chicago. The connection to community he finds here links Frank to the
South, and his camaraderie with the man on the stool next to him prevents him from
having another one of his episodes.
After leaving Chicago on a train bound for Atlanta, Frank’s condition improves
even more. Frank still relives his war memories, but he “suddenly realized that those
memories, powerful as they were, did not crush him anymore or throw him into
paralyzing despair. He could recall every detail, every sorrow, without needing alcohol to
steady him” (100). Just moving into the space of the South enables Frank to gain back
power over his psyche. Morrison represents the South as a space that can bear Frank’s
sorrow without it destroying him. He begins to let go, not only of Mike and Stuff’s
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deaths, but of his community-defined identity tying his existence to theirs. His individual
identity, however, is still entangled with his sister.
While his love for his sister is what brings him back to the South and energizes
his recovery from his war experience, it also speaks to his individual emptiness. Frank
describes both he and his sister as not entirely existent. He tells Morrison, “When you
write this down, know this: she was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its
own absence, or maybe mine. Who am I without her” (103). He cannot see himself
independently of Cee. Her existence signifies the identity each of them is missing. After
being faced with reconfiguring his community-defined identity through the deaths of his
friends, Frank cannot bear the prospect of recovering his individual identity from another
place of loss. He says, “No more people I didn’t save. Not more watching people close to
me die. No more” (103). His attempts to save Mike and Stuff fail. In the war, he covers
their wounds and collects their body parts in hopes of keeping them alive, but he is not
equipped to save them. He could only helplessly watch. This experience recalls the
forgotten and emasculating scene from his childhood. He can only watch the black body
being thrown into a grave with no ceremony. His action in that moment is to protect his
sister, by covering her eyes and holding her. He believes he saves his sister by keeping
her hidden, but he is powerless to do anything for the man being buried.
Even though Frank had been Cee’s caretaker prior to their witnessing the burial as
young children, it is in this moment that he defines himself as her protector and makes
her dependent upon him. The novel insinuates that Cee’s dependence on Frank to
safeguard her from the world is detrimental to her survival, as it leaves her unable to
insulate herself emotionally or physically. After recovering Cee’s frail body from her
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employer Dr.Beau’s home in Atlanta, Frank takes her back to their hometown. He is then
excluded from her healing process as Mrs. Ethel and the other community women take
over. The narrator recounts,
he was blocked from visiting the sickroom by every woman
in the neighborhood. If it weren’t for the girl Jackie he
would have known nothing at all. From her he learned that
they believed his maleness would worsen her condition.
She told him the women took turns nursing Cee and each
had a different recipe for her cure. What they all agreed
upon was his absence from her bedside. (119)
Although each woman has her own opinion about how to approach Cee’s physical
healing, they all believe they must keep Frank away. Frank’s exclusion on the basis of his
maleness references his physical and emotional maleness. Physically, the women work to
heal the damage Dr. Baeu’s experiments do to her physical femaleness, reproductive
organs. Frank’s physical maleness as the opposite sex disrupts the female space the
women create to heal her reproductive organs On the other side, Frank’s emotional
maleness will obstruct both Cee’s physical and emotional recovery because Cee knows
Frank as her defender, the one who would kill for her (104). Allowing Frank to be by her
side would potentially keep Cee emotionally weak, hence impeding her from healing
properly. The actions of the community’s women is reminiscent of the healing of
Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved when she needs protection from the malicious manifestation
of Beloved and the ritual healing that occurs for Marshall’s Avey in Praisesong for the
Widow when she is physically cleansed in preparation for her emotional repair.
The Lotus community, both men and women, are not particularly concerned with
Frank’s wholeness, but seeing Cee nearly dead due to her inability to define and respect
herself as an individual, independent of her brother, brings the community’s women to
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action. While the community had been indifferent to or harsh on Cee previously, when
she displays clear need and violation by a man, the women protect and reeducate her to
be able to guard her mind and body in the future. Following Cee’s physical improvement,
Mrs. Ethel turns her attention to Cee’s emotional rehabilitation of her self. This requires
Mrs. Ethel to undo years of verbal and physical abuse inflicted upon Cee by her stepgrandmother who “Branded [her] early as an unlovable, barely tolerated ‘gutter child’
[…] she had agreed with the label and believed herself worthless” (128-129). This
community-defined, but false, identity established by her step-grandmother is the only
one Cee has until Mrs. Ethel helps her take her self back. Mrs. Ethel asks Cee to search
herself until she locates an individual personhood not dictated by others:
“Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is
obliged to save you but you. Seed your own land. You
young and a woman and there’s serious limitation in both,
but you a person too. Don’t let Lenore or some trifling
boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are.
That’s slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person
I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in
the world.” (126)
Although Frank is not mentioned in this lecture because he does not intentionally hurt
Cee as the others do, he is alluded to as the one Cee always expects to save her. Mrs.
Ethel emphasizes the need for Cee to reclaim her own life and to learn to care for her self.
Throughout the remainder of the novel, Cee works to keep her newly found or rather
regained individuality separate from Frank.
In contrast to the communal aspect of Cee’s healing, Frank is left to rediscover his
own distinctiveness. Like Cee, his self has been intwined with her since their childhood
in his role as protector. He reflects, “She was the first-person I ever took responsibility
for. Down deep inside her lived my secret picture of myself—a strong good me tied to the
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memory of those horses and the burial of a stranger” (104). Cee’s final rejection of the
fallacious community-defined identity promoted by her step-grandmother along with her
own self-discovery forces Frank to reconcile his own self. When the black women’s
community of Lotus usher Cee back into the world after months of rehabilitation, “They
delivered unto [Frank] a Cee who would never again need his hand over her eyes or his
arms to stop her murmuring bones” (128). Cee’s independence disrupts the picture of
himself he had secretly stored in her. This heroic vision he holds of himself, which he
wanted to display in Cee’s healing, is, however, contested and indeed shattered by his
actions in Korea.
Frank recognizes Cee’s vision of a young girl, which she imagines is the baby she
would never have, as the young girl he kills in Korea. Frank creates his own healing
ritual, but does not perform it alone. He and Cee return to the site of the brutal burial they
witness as children after Frank learns the story behind the death. The man recklessly
tossed in the ground was a father who sacrificed his life so the white spectators would let
his son live—though this surrender took the gruesome form of forcing his son to kill him.
Throughout his life, Frank has either been in or envisioned himself in the position of
watcher. As a child, he watches the burial. As a soldier, he watches Mike and Stuff’s
deaths, and he lies to himself about the Korean girl in order to be the watcher instead of
the killer. While Frank cannot return to Korea to bury the young girl he kills there, he can
return to the site of this man’s murder and take action to undo the disrespect paid to the
man’s life through a proper burial ritual.
Frank and Cee walk the five miles in silence to the place where they once hid in
the grass while a man’s body was carelessly covered with dirt. Frank does not explain his
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actions to Cee, but she quickly understands what they are there to do as Frank begins
exhuming the bones. Frank uses Cee’s first and newly finished quilt to hold the man’s
bones: “Carefully, carefully, Frank placed the bones on Cee’s quilt, doing his best to
arrange them the way they once were in life. The quilt became a shroud of lilac, crimson,
yellow, and dark navy blue. Together they folded the fabric and knotted its ends. Frank
handed Cee the shovel and carried the gentleman in his arms” (143). Although Cee is
initially embarrassed that her novice, flawed quilt would be use for anyone, she does not
protest. In fact, the use of her quilt, which is crafted during her time spent healing, is
entirely appropriate. The quilt she pours her pain into and develops her strength from
becomes peace for both her and the bones shrouded by it. The careful re-composition of
the man’s bones and ritualized carrying of him as a gentleman signifies Franks successful
exhumation of and coming to terms with the past.
In the culmination of Frank’s burial ritual, he devises a different type of burial
plot that will complete his restoration of this corpse’s personhood. Beneath “the sweet
bay tree—split down the middle, beheaded, undead—spreading its arms, one to the right,
one to the left,” Frank digs “a four- or five-foot hole some thirty-six inches wide” (144)
to place the body in. He marks the grave with the words “Here stands a man” (145).
Rather than horizontally and literally laying the man to rest, Frank digs a hole that will
allow the man to rest standing as a man for the rest of eternity. Through this act, Frank
both re-establishes the brave father’s personhood and claims his own. Frank is no longer
the young boy hiding in the grass protecting his fragile sister. He now stands as a man
beside his strong sister, confronting and reclaiming his past.
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The last chapter of the novel is returned to Frank’s first-person account. In his
final reflection, Frank reflects on his choice to bury the man at the base of a decapitated
tree that is split down the middle. He recuperates his self:
I stood there a long while, staring at that tree.
It looked so strong
So beautiful.
Hurt right down the middle
But alive and well.
Cee touched my shoulder
Lightly.
Frank?
Yes?
Come on, brother. Let’s go home. (147)
His admiration of the tree represents his self-acceptance. The tree symbolizes Frank’s
perception of his self. Despite the tattered appearance of the tree, it remains undead. The
longer he looks at the tree the more he comes to realize that the tree is not simply
surviving, but it is strong, beautiful, and alive and well. He also acknowledges it as “hurt”
instead of “split” as the narrator conveys. This distinction suggests that it is a wound that
has the ability to heal and recover, rather than a separation that may not be repaired. The
harrowing experiences of Frank’s life have made him determined to stand as a man and
perhaps to watch over the grave of the unknown father to ensure he is also able to stand
like a man. Although he orchestrates this entire healing outside of the community, the
actions he takes on behalf of his self are also taken on behalf of his community.
Morrison departs from the distinct ancestor figure in Home requiring the South to
function independently from extended family histories. She suggests, instead, that the
exploration of the effects the immediate southern past has on her characters can also
allow what is required to reintegrate the self. While Cee’s healing follows a traditional
community model, Frank is able to create his own healing practice, one that allows him
216
to recover outside of a community and is not tied to publicly performing a predetermined
masculinity. In contrast to Milkman’s initiation into the southern community through his
participation in a hunting party with other men, Frank keeps his distance from the
community of men in Lotus, like his grandfather whose only interest in his
granddaughter’s recovery is to find out what happened to his car.
***
The African American return migration novel of the post-Civil Rights era seeks to
create a space where characters can realize their individual identities and incorporate
them with their community-defined identities. This ultimately must occur in the space of
the South because, like the characters, the South is portrayed as being in a state of
redefinition. It is dependent, however, on the migrants’ ability to recognize the space as
fluid, instead of static, in order for them to achieve a whole self. Morrison presents this as
a exhuming and burying of the past, in Frank’s case, or a claiming of one’s own future, as
in Cee’s case. Naylor, on the other hand, suggests that it is necessary to carry the past into
the future to maintain the whole self.
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CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the African American return migration novel of the post-Civil
Rights era is about a reconciliation with the southern experience. Re-invoking the South
of the Civil Rights Movement allows for the bringing together of the successes of the
Movement and the limits met by it. The interrogation of the urban North and the rural
South rejects the notion of place as static and allows for the redefinition of the South as
both urban and rural. The reassessment of community in relation to the individual and the
how it functions in the South creates the space for the individual to acquire what is
needed from the community without allowing it to maintain its damaging power.
Additionally, the loss of the idealized traditional community in African American culture
is responded to in these novels by the characters’ ability to accept the limits of
community and move forward by reconstructing what they need from it.
As the return migration of African American’s to the South continues so does the
literary representations of it. The increase in African American’s claiming a southern
regional identity that captured the attention of James C. Cobb and Thadious Davis
continues to inspire black writers’ imaginations. Most recently, Natalie Baszile’s debut
novel Queen Sugar (2014) recounts the return migration of mother Charley and her
young daughter Micha from Los Angeles to a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana that she
inherits from her father, playfully named Ernest. Baszile depicts the encounter with the
South as an unknown space and as culturally foreign to their west coast experience. She
fits into the new generation of black women writers, alongside Tayari Jones. Much like
218
Jones’s novels, Queen Sugar seeks out a modern South; however, instead of situating it
within the city as Jones does, Baszile considers what the modern rural South looks like
and how it is experienced by newly arrived black southerners.
As analyses of current and future migration numbers continue, it will be important
to understand where the migrants are leaving and where they are going in order to
continue understanding the role of the South in these population shifts. The more difficult
question to answer from statistical data is why they are migrating. Current data
documenting a population shift in Washington D.C. that has displaced the black
population from its position as the dominant population in the city, raises the question:
where has that population gone? In U.S. census data, Washington D.C. occupies the
region of the South. So, have these migrants moved within the region, from one southern
city to another or to more rural locales?
Studies have begun immerging that consider African American literature in
relation to the
political climate of “the age of Obama.” For example, Robert Stepto’s A Home
Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama (2010) and
Stephanie Li’s Signifying Without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama
(2011) both question how issues surrounding race are being reconfigured. While Stepto
comparatively looks all the way back to Fredrick Douglass to examine black manhood in
the age of Obama, Li addresses how contemporary writers from Toni Morrison to
Jhumpa Lahiri are developing new ways to treat race in their texts without an open
discussion of it. These questions of change should continue to be asked of the South.
219
Over the past two years, the Stand Your Ground gun law in Florida has drawn
considerable national media attention, first with the killing of Trayvon Martin and, then
the less highly publicized, killing of Jordan Davis. While Stand Your Ground law exist in
dozen of states, including those in the North and the West, the South maintains its
position in American popular imagination as the site of racism and unjust laws. The
repeated use of Stand Your Ground being used as a legal defense for the killing of young
black men by middle-aged white men, reestablishes lynching of a different form in the
21st century. Additionally, the Florida law’s failure to protect Marissa Alexander, as a
black woman who stood her ground while being attacked at her home, further illuminates
the prejudicial upholding of the law in the southern state. Zora Neale Hurston’s
romanticized southern home state of Florida does not appear as frequently in
contemporary African American literature, but these current injustices could spur
historical fiction in the vein of Jones’s Leaving Atlanta to explore African American’s
relationship to the state, especially since it is a state that is a popular retirement
destination for black return migrants.
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VITA
Shelli Homer was born in 1985 and raised with her older brother in the small,
southern San Diego beach town of Imperial Beach, California. She excelled in
mathematics during high school and entered Chico State with the intent of declaring math
as her major. However, she quickly became intrigued with the non-linear and interpretive
challenge of the humanities. While in undergrad, she put her Italian minor to work when
she spent the summer of 2006 as an American nanny for an Italian family in Forte di
Marmi, Tuscany. She graduated from Chico State in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in
English and American Studies and in 2009 with a master’s degree in English. She entered
the University of Missouri in the fall of 2009 with an amazing cohort that saw one
another through another phase of academia.
234